The dire cancer incidence and mortality statistics for Black patients compared with White patients are well known. Collectively, Black individuals have the highest mortality rate and shortest survival of any racial or ethnic group in the United States for most cancers. Black men also have the...
In a study reported in TheNew England Journal of Medicine, Leila Dorling, PhD, of the Centre for Cancer Genetic Epidemiology, Departments of Public Health and Primary Care, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, and colleagues in the international Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC),...
In a study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Awad et al identified potential mechanisms of acquired resistance to the KRAS G12C inhibitor adagrasib in patients receiving the agent for treatment of KRAS G12C–mutant cancers. As noted by the investigators, clinical trials of the KRAS...
On July 6, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved an expanded label for pembrolizumab, an anti–PD-1 agent, as monotherapy for patients with locally advanced cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma that is not curable by surgery or radiation. This approval is based on data from the second...
Despite new and effective treatments for melanoma with checkpoint inhibitors and targeted therapies, patients with metastatic melanoma who progress on frontline treatment generally do very poorly. “We really need to make sure we give these patients access to drugs that we know have some efficacy,”...
Recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued regulatory decisions related to treatments for non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), acute leukemia, and mantle cell lymphoma. Breakthrough Therapy Designation for Adagrasib in Advanced NSCLC With KRAS G12C Mutation On June 24, 2021, the...
Although breast cancer continues to be the most common cancer diagnosed in women in the United States, and remains the second-leading cause of cancer death, over the past several decades, the disease has affected Black and White women differently. According to the findings of a large retrospective...
In a post hoc analysis from the phase III TAILORx trial reported in JAMA Oncology, Yanez et al identified factors that may be associated with an increased and decreased likelihood of early discontinuation of adjuvant endocrine therapy for breast cancer. Study Details The TAILORx trial, conducted...
On Friday, April 9, 2021, ASCO and Friends of Cancer Research (Friends) co-hosted a live virtual event, which brought together experts from across the health-care sector to discuss the recent release of the new ASCO-Friends recommendations for modernizing eligibility criteria to improve patient...
Better understanding of the mechanism behind the malignant transformation of B cells has led to an explosion of “targeted” therapy. With the growing knowledge of the role of the B-cell receptor and its downstream kinases, it appeared that we were entering a new era in the management of patients...
Female gynecologic oncologists have reported in a survey that having a department chair of the same gender is no buffer against gender harassment or discrimination in the workplace. The information comes from a survey of the “Women of Gynecologic Oncology” Facebook group and was reported in March...
“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.” —Mark Twain To complement The ASCO Post’s continued comprehensive coverage of the 2020 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition, here are several abstracts selected from the meeting proceedings focusing on...
In women with locally advanced cervical cancer, adjuvant chemotherapy adds no benefit to standard cisplatin-based chemoradiation, results of the international phase III OUTBACK study have shown,1 as reported at the 2021 ASCO Annual Meeting by Linda R. Mileshkin, MD, Professor of Medical Oncology at ...
The breakthrough KRAS-specific inhibitor sotorasib achieved responses in patients with KRAS G12C–mutated non–small lung cancer (NSCLC) who had experienced disease progression on platinum-based chemotherapy, immunotherapy, or both treatments. The objective response rate was 37.1%, and responses...
Martin Reck, MD, PhD, of LungenClinic, discusses a 2-year update of the CheckMate 9LA study, which sought to determine whether nivolumab plus ipilimumab combined with two cycles of chemotherapy is more effective than four cycles of chemotherapy alone as a first-line treatment for patients with...
Non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) accounts for 80% to 85% of cases of lung cancer; when it is diagnosed early, there is a 5-year survival rate of 50% to 80%. Black patients have a lower overall incidence of NSCLC than White patients but are more likely to be diagnosed at later stages. They also...
Adding the antibody-drug conjugate naratuximab emtansine to rituximab resulted in favorable overall survival and complete response rates for patients with relapsed or refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), with a manageable safety profile. These findings from a phase II study were...
As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Chung-Han Lee, MD, and colleagues, findings in a cohort of the phase Ib/II Study 111/KEYNOTE-146 trial showed that the combination of lenvatinib and pembrolizumab produced high response rates among patients with metastatic clear cell renal cell carcinoma...
New research has uncovered substantial differences in the rates of childhood cancers when considering a single year of age rather than grouping several years together. The study, published by Marcotte et al in the journal Cancer, also found that minority children seem to have different risks than...
In a large cohort study reported by Sharafeldin et al in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, researchers from the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) found that COVID-19–positive vs –negative status was associated with an increased risk of all-cause mortality at 1 year among patients with...
The association between the consumption of red and processed meats and the development of colorectal cancer, as well as pancreatic and prostate cancers, has been known since 2015, when the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified the consumption of red meat as probably...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Pollard et al, a subgroup of pediatric patients with KMT2A-rearranged acute myeloid leukemia (AML) in the phase III Children’s Oncology Group AAML0531 trial had improved outcomes with the addition of the CD33-targeting agent gemtuzumab ozogamicin...
From routine axillary lymph node dissection to sentinel lymph node surgery, the use of axillary surgery continues to evolve in breast cancer. Recently, surgical oncologists have begun to consider avoiding axillary surgery completely in patients with a low risk of node-positive disease as well as in ...
In the treatment of relapsed/refractory follicular lymphoma, a comparison of data from the ZUMA-5 trial with those of the external control cohort of the SCHOLAR-5 trial showed substantial improvement in all clinical endpoints with axicabtagene ciloleucel. John G. Gribben, DSc, FRCP, FRCPath,...
As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Justin F. Gainor, MD, and colleagues, an interim analysis of the phase I/II ARROW trial has shown that the oral RET inhibitor pralsetinib produced high response rates in previously treated and treatment-naive patients with advanced RET fusion–positive non–small ...
As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Matthew J. Matasar, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and colleagues, the phase III CHRONOS-3 trial has shown that the addition of the pan-class I PI3K inhibitor copanlisib to rituximab significantly improved progression-free survival vs rituximab ...
In recent years, immune checkpoint inhibitors in the treatment of mesothelioma have been a keen area of investigation for this immunogenic solid tumor. With recent publications, principally findings from CheckMate 743 by Baas et al1 (reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post), combination immune...
In a letter recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine and reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post, Rousseau and colleagues reported data on the spectrum of benefit from immune checkpoint blockade in hypermutated tumors.1 Indeed, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently...
In a letter to the editor in The New England Journal of Medicine, Benoit Rousseau, MD, PhD, and Michael B. Foote, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), and colleagues presented evidence that a high tumor mutational burden (TMB) threshold of 10 alone may not be sufficient to predict...
Although once again, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®) 2021 Annual Conference could not take place on site in Orlando, researchers presented their work virtually in the form of almost 100 posters. The ASCO Post has summarized some that we found particularly interesting. Many...
Discussant of the abstract on this novel algorithm, Thomas Herzog, MD, Deputy Director of the University of Cincinnati Cancer Institute and Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the UC College of Medicine, called the use of risk-based factors in complex ovarian cancer surgery to successfully...
COVID-19 pandemic–related disruptions in cancer diagnosis, treatment, and research have varied worldwide and so have the responses to those disruptions. During the Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) 2021 International Conference on Surgical Cancer Care, members of the Global Forum of Cancer...
The pace of clinical research in metastatic renal cell carcinoma is faster than ever. Over the past 5 years, we have seen data from six phase III clinical trials evaluating combination strategies with checkpoint inhibitors. The era began with data from CheckMate 214, evaluating nivolumab with...
Atezolizumab given after chemotherapy to patients with resected stage II to IIIA non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) significantly improved disease-free survival compared with best supportive care alone in patients whose tumors expressed PD-L1.1 These results of the global phase III IMpower010 trial ...
Invited discussant Christine Lovly, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine, Ingram Associate Professor of Cancer Research, Vanderbilt University Ingram Cancer Center, Nashville, discussed progress in targeted therapies for NSCLC. “We have a tremendous amount of knowledge about driver mutations in ...
Even though next-generation sequencing is recommended by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) for biomarker testing for patients with non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the uptake among community oncology practices is suboptimal, and the uptake is even lower among Black patients with...
In a retrospective cohort study reported in JAMA Network Open, Heiden et al found that increased time from preoperative diagnostic computed tomography imaging and surgical treatment was associated with an increased risk of disease recurrence and poorer overall survival in patients with clinical...
The first overall survival analysis of the WSG-ADAPT HR-/HER2+ study, which evaluated neoadjuvant therapy in patients with hormone receptor (HR)-negative, HER2-positive breast cancer, showed that treatment with pertuzumab and trastuzumab plus paclitaxel—or the chemotherapy-free regimen of...
Vamsidhar Velcheti, MD, of New York University, discusses overall survival and exploratory subgroup analyses from the phase II CodeBreaK 100 trial, which evaluated the use of sotorasib in pretreated KRAS G12C–mutant non–small cell lung cancer (Abstract 9003).
Results from the phase II cohort of the CodeBreaK 100 study showed that treatment with the KRAS G12C inhibitor sotorasib achieved a 37.1% objective response rate and a median overall survival of 12.5 months in previously treated patients with KRAS G12C–mutated non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC)....
Byoung Chul Cho, MD, PhD, of the Yonsei Cancer Center, discusses study results that showed treatment with the EGFR-MET bispecific antibody amivantamab plus the EGFR inhibitor lazertinib yielded responses in 36% of chemotherapy-naive patients with non–small cell lung cancer whose disease progressed...
Pasi A. Janne, MD, PhD, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, discusses study findings that show patritumab deruxtecan is effective in patients with EGFR-mutated and inhibitor-resistant non–small cell lung cancer. Dr. Janne also explains why targeting HER3, a mutation expressed in most EGFR-altered...
This week marks our 100th episode of the podcast! We launched at the start of the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting, and this week, we’re reporting major findings from the 2021 Annual Meeting, including adjuvant therapy for patients with BRCA-mutated breast cancer, LuPSMA for metastatic prostate cancer, and ...
Debora S. Bruno, MD, of Seidman Cancer Center at Cleveland Medical Center, discusses study findings that show Black patients with advanced or metastatic non–small cell lung cancer tend to be less likely to undergo biomarker testing or to be treated in clinical trials than White patients....
Results from the phase II MyPathway basket trial found that the HER2-targeted therapies pertuzumab and trastuzumab demonstrated durable activity in patients with a wide variety of tumors marked by HER2 amplification or overexpression, although responses were limited in those with KRAS mutations....
Jaap Verweij, MD, PhD, FASCO, was born in 1953 in Velsen, a municipality situated on both sides of the massive North Sea Canal in the Netherlands. His father was a sea captain, and other close family members also plied the oceans for a living in the fishing or transport industries. Dr. Verweij...
The field of geriatric oncology has developed steadily over the past several decades, thanks to the dedication of a close-knit community of oncologists who have devoted their careers to advancing multidisciplinary care for older patients with cancer. One such leader is Silvio Monfardini, MD, past...
Over the past year (May 2020–May 2021), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved and expanded indications for many drugs related to the treatment of different types of cancers and adverse events. The new approvals and accelerated approvals are listed below. PEMBROLIZUMAB (KEYTRUDA) in...
In a retrospective cohort study reported in JCO Oncology Practice, Hong et al found that prior frequent emergency department use was the strongest predictor of postdiagnosis emergency department visits among patients with a new diagnosis of cancer. Study Details The study involved data from adults...
In a population-based study reported in JAMA Oncology, Susan M. Domchek, MD, and colleagues found “no clinically meaningful differences” in the prevalence of germline pathogenic variants in 12 established breast cancer susceptibility genes between Black and non-Hispanic White women with breast...