Outcomes in patients with triple-class–failure relapsed and refractory multiple myeloma who experience disease progression on immunomodulatory agents, proteasome inhibitors, and CD38 antibodies are dismal. Most recently, early results of three anti-B-cell maturation antigen (BCMA) chimeric antigen...
As reported inThe Lancet Oncology by Michael C. Heinrich, MD, of the VA Portland Health Care System and the Oregon Health & Science University Knight Cancer Institute, and colleagues, the phase I NAVIGATOR trial showed that the PDGFRA and KIT kinase inhibitor avapritinib produced a high...
At the 2020 Debates and Didactics in Hematology and Oncology Virtual Conference, sponsored by Emory University School of Medicine and Winship Cancer Institute, Pamela Allen, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Emory, described recent trials on therapeutic approaches that are informative on this...
A review of the 2019 Drug Trials Snapshots Report1 from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) showed that although female participation in clinical trials grew to 72% from 56% in the FDA’s 2018 Drug Trials Snapshots Report,2 ethnic minority participation in clinical trials actually declined...
Combined use of aspirin, metformin, and statins may be associated with decreased lung cancer incidence and mortality, according to a study published by Kang et al in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology. Study Methods The aim of this study was to investigate the associations of the three agents with...
A prospective biomarker analysis of the multicohort phase II KEYNOTE-158 trial reported by Marabelle et al in The Lancet Oncology found that patients with previously treated advanced solid tumors were more likely to respond to pembrolizumab monotherapy if they had high tissue tumor mutational...
As reported in European Urology by Matthew R. Smith, MD, and colleagues, the final analysis of phase III SPARTAN trial has shown significant prolongation of overall survival with apalutamide vs placebo in patients with nonmetastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer and prostate-specific antigen ...
As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine and during the ESMO Virtual Congress 2020 (Abstract 610O) by Maha Hussain, MD, FACP, FASCO, and colleagues, an overall survival analysis from the phase III PROfound trial has shown a significant benefit with olaparib vs physician’s choice of...
In a phase II trial reported in JAMA Oncology, Sara M. Tolaney, MD, MPH, and colleagues found that the addition of pembrolizumab to eribulin did not improve progression-free survival in women with hormone receptor (HR)-positive, HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer. As stated by the...
As reported in JAMA Oncology by Kohei Shitara, MD, and colleagues, the phase III KEYNOTE-062 trial showed no significant improvement in overall or progression-free survival with first-line pembrolizumab with or without chemotherapy vs chemotherapy alone in patients with PD-L1–positive advanced...
Clinicians who treat multiple myeloma can anticipate a host of new treatments: melflufen, cereblon E3 ligase (CEL) modulators, antibody-drug conjugates, bispecific antibodies, and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies. Kenneth C. Anderson, MD, Director of the Jerome Lipper Multiple...
Seattle Cancer Care Alliance (SCCA) announced the beginning of construction on its South Lake Union campus to add a six-story, 150,000 square-foot outpatient cancer treatment clinic. The largest single construction project in SCCA history, the new building will feature a patient-centered design,...
On January 1, 2021, significant changes to the office and outpatient Evaluation and Management (E&M) services Current Procedural Terminology (CPT®) codes (99202-99215) will go into effect. Practices, physicians, and staff must prepare in advance for these changes to ensure a successful...
“Ask any doctor why he or she enters medicine and the answer will likely be the same,” said Marc L. Citron, MD. “People become doctors to help patients...but to deliver the moments that matter to patients—to extend their lives and give quality to their days—doctors rely on new research.” In 2003,...
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released its 2021 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (MPFS) proposed rule, which includes updates to the Quality Payment Program (QPP). For the QPP 2021 performance period, CMS proposes the following Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS)...
Multiple myeloma is a malignant clonal plasma cell malignancy that primarily affects older adults. Although therapeutic advances have led to improvements in disease-specific and overall survival over the past decade, age-related survival disparities continue to exist. The higher prevalence of...
In a phase III trial (PROfound) reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Johann de Bono, MB, ChB, PhD, of the Institute of Cancer Research and Royal Marsden Hospital, London, and colleagues found that olaparib significantly improved progression-free survival vs hormonal therapy in patients...
The American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) has selected 19 distinguished members to receive the ASTRO Fellow (FASTRO) designation. The 2020 class of Fellows will be recognized at a virtual awards ceremony on October 27 during ASTRO’s 62nd Annual Meeting. The ASTRO Fellows program...
The ASCO20 Virtual Scientific Program was a landmark year for the field of geriatric oncology, featuring more than 300 research abstracts that presented data on older adults with cancer. Here, we discuss several high-impact studies investigating interventions that modify outcomes for this patient...
Earlier this year, as the COVID-19 pandemic was spreading across the United States, federal health officials and cancer societies urged Americans to delay routine cancer screenings and other elective procedures to keep them out of clinics to avoid potential exposure to the coronavirus and to...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Vicky Makker, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, and colleagues, findings from a phase Ib/II trial indicate that the combination of lenvatinib and pembrolizumab is active in patients with previously treated advanced...
The ASCO Post spoke with Alexander Melamed, MD, MPH, a gynecologic oncologist and Assistant Professor of Obstetrics & Gynecology at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, New York, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York. New York state has had more coronavirus cases ...
In studies reported at the ESMO Congress 2019, immunotherapy yielded encouraging outcomes in two gynecologic cancer populations in need of new treatments, including patients with advanced cervical cancer that is microsatellite-stable and patients previously treated for advanced endometrial cancer....
An updated analysis of the phase III VELIA/GOG-3005 trial, presented during the 2020 Society of Gynecologic Oncology (SGO) Annual Meeting on Women’s Cancer Webinar Series,1 suggested synergy between the poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitor veliparib and platinum chemotherapy in the...
the final results of the phase II KEYNOTE-100 study of pembrolizumab in women with advanced and recurrent ovarian cancer showed that pembrolizumab monotherapy produced modest clinical activity. Ursula Matulonis, MD, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, reported the data at the...
For the first time, overall survival has been improved with maintenance therapy involving a poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitor in patients with platinum-sensitive recurrent ovarian cancer associated with BRCA1/2 mutations. In the final, preplanned, overall survival analysis in the...
Discussant of the DESKTOP III and SOC1 trials, Robert L. Coleman, MD, of U.S. Oncology Research in Woodlands, Texas, congratulated the authors of both trials. He put these results in perspective with the GOG-0213 study, which did not show a survival benefit for secondary surgery. “There are general ...
In the phase III VELIA/GOG-3005 trial—reported at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 20191 and simultaneously published in The New England Journal of Medicine2—Robert L. Coleman, MD, of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, and colleagues found that the ...
Thomas J. Herzog, MD, Deputy Director, University of Cincinnati Cancer Center, who presented a distillation of the PRIMA trial data along with updated results of the phase III PAOLA-1 trial of olaparib plus bevacizumab maintenance, called the data “practice-changing.” “We’ve suspected for a while...
Based on multiple phase III prospective trials, there is evidence that both poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitors and antiangiogenic therapies such as bevacizumab provide benefit when utilized in a maintenance strategy in the first-line treatment of advanced epithelial ovarian cancer (GOG...
As reported inThe New England Journal of Medicine by Isabelle Ray-Coquard, MD, PhD, of the Céntre Léon Berard, University Claude Bernard Lyon 1 and Groupe d’Investigateurs Nationaux pour l’Etude des Cancers Ovariens (GINECO), Paris, and colleagues, the phase III PAOLA-1 trial has shown a...
Ovarian cancer is associated with the highest risk of mortality among the five most common gynecologic cancers (cervical, ovarian, uterine [endometrial], vaginal, and vulvar) in the United States; in 2020 in the United States, ovarian cancer will be diagnosed in an estimated 21,750 women, and...
On September 1, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved oral azacitidine (Onureg; also known as CC-486) for the continued treatment of adult patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) who achieved first complete remission or complete remission with incomplete blood count recovery...
A new study from the American Cancer Society has found health insurance coverage disruptions in the prior year led to issues with health-care access and affordability for currently insured cancer survivors. The study was published by Zhao et al in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention....
The first-line setting for patients with locally advanced or metastatic non-squamous non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) now has become more complicated, according to data presented during the 2020 International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer’s World Conference on Lung Cancer Virtual...
In a study reported in JAMA Oncology, Bitterman et al found that Black pediatric patients enrolled in Children’s Oncology Group (COG) trials were significantly less likely to receive proton radiotherapy than non-Hispanic White pediatric patients. As stated by the investigators, “Proton radiotherapy ...
In a study reported in JCO Oncology Practice, Ziakas et al found that Medicare Part D spending on oncology drugs increased markedly between 2013 and 2017, with spending increasing at a rate markedly greater than that attributed to all other medical care providers. Study Details Medicare Part D...
Although radiotherapy is integral to the multidisciplinary therapy used in the treatment of common childhood and adolescent and young adult (AYA) cancers, including Hodgkin lymphomas, sarcomas, and breast cancer, the treatment is a strong risk factor for a secondary breast malignancy, especially...
Cornelius O. “Skip” Granai, MD, Founder of the Program in Women’s Oncology at Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island, died on June 28, 2020, after a long bout with cancer. Dr. Granai strongly believed that cancer care for women should encompass both breast and gynecologic cancers, according...
The text and photograph here are excerpted from a four-volume series of books titled Oncology: Tumors & Treatment, A Photographic History, The Anesthesia Era 1845–1875 by Stanley B. Burns, MD, FACS, and Elizabeth A. Burns. The photograph appears courtesy of Stanley B. Burns, MD, and The Burns...
Three years ago, former Chief Executive Officer of ASCO, Allen S. Lichter, MD, Laurence H. Baker, DO, Professor in the Departments of Internal Medicine and Pharmacology at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor; Leonard Saltz, MD, a gastrointestinal oncologist at Memorial Sloan...
Cancer does not affect all people equally. The phrase “cancer disparities” refers to the differences in the number of new cancer cases as well as differences in cancer outcomes that exist among different populations. Disparities more often negatively affect racial and ethnic minorities, poor...
As investigators, we were always determined to find the drug to work with BRAF/MEK inhibitor combination therapy. It had come on like a storm and showed us that we could help even those with the most advanced metastatic melanoma, as long as it harbored the magical BRAF V600E mutation.1...
As reported inThe Lancet by Ralf Gutzmer, MD, of Medizinische Hochschule Hannover, Germany, and colleagues, the phase III IMspire150 trial has shown that the addition of atezolizumab to BRAF and MEK inhibitor therapy with vemurafenib and cobimetinib improved progression-free survival in the...
The ASCO Post is pleased to present Hematology Expert Review, an ongoing feature that occasionally quizzes readers on issues in hematology. In this installment, Drs. Abutalib, Pemmaraju, and Medeiros highlight the clinically aggressive blastic plasmacytoid dendritic cell neoplasm. For each quiz...
Following an extensive national search, Bert W. O’Malley, Jr, MD, has been appointed as the new President and Chief Executive Officer of the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC), the flagship academic hospital for the University of Maryland Medical System and an anchor institution in...
A vaccine for COVID-19 is currently the Holy Grail, but even if an effective vaccine were developed on a fast-track timetable, it may be effective in only a percentage of people, judging by existing flu vaccines, which show efficacy rates of approximately 45% and vary year by year. Until we have a...
Oncologists should consider screening all patients with cancer for the hepatitis B virus (HBV) prior to starting systemic anticancer therapy, with a focus on tests that use the hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg), hepatitis B core antibody (anti-HBc), total Ig or IgG, and antihepatitis B surface...
My husband and I adopted our cat, Franklin, on a cold November day. It was one of the last days Andrew felt well enough to leave the house to go anywhere other than to chemotherapy or a doctor’s appointment. Our news at these appointments had shifted toward the negative, with disease progression...
As evidenced at this year’s ASCO20 Virtual Scientific Program, oncology science, technology, and clinical practice are evolving at a rapid pace, bringing new challenges to the efficient and ethical practice of cancer care at all levels. To shed light on some of the large-scale public health and...