ASCO discussant Nicole Chau, MD, Clinical Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia/BC Cancer in Vancouver, said the COSMIC-311 trial was “noteworthy for meeting its co-primary endpoint of progression-free survival (hazard ratio = 0.22) in this heavily pretreated patient...
The tyrosine kinase inhibitor cabozantinib appears to be an effective new option for treatment-refractory differentiated thyroid cancer, according to the phase III COSMIC-311 trial, which was stopped early for efficacy.1 COSMIC-311 is the first randomized placebo-controlled trial to evaluate the...
The invited discussant of GeparNuevo,1 Melinda L. Telli, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, Director of the Breast Cancer Program at the Stanford Cancer Institute, and Associate Director of the Stanford Women’s Cancer Center, welcomed the additional data...
“Naratuximab emtansine plus rituximab appears to be an effective and well tolerated combination in a heavily pretreated population. The results of the study are very promising,” said Leslie Popplewell, MD, Associate Clinical Professor, Department of Hematology and Hematopoietic Cell...
The ASCO Post invited Jacqueline C. Barrientos, MD, MS, Associate Professor of Medicine, CLL Research and Treatment Program, Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, Lake Success, New York, to comment on the ALPINE findings presented at the European Hematology Association (EHA) Virtual...
The 5-year outcomes in the APACT trial uphold the overall survival benefit with nab-paclitaxel plus gemcitabine in the adjuvant treatment of patients with resected pancreatic cancer, according to Margaret A. Tempero, MD, Director of the University of California San Francisco Pancreas Center, who...
I first noticed blood in my stool when I was in the 8th grade. My mom and I did an Internet search and were relieved to find that the cause was most likely nothing more serious than hemorrhoids, so I put the problem out of my mind. I played volleyball and had an active social life, and the...
Robert Winn, MD, Director of Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Massey Cancer Center, has been elected by the members of the Association of American Cancer Institutes (AACI) to serve as Vice President/President-Elect of AACI’s Board of Directors. Dr. Winn’s new position is effective...
Pelin Cinar, MD, MS, was born and reared in Istanbul, Turkey. “My father ran a small furniture business, and my mother was a homemaker. However, I had a distant cousin who was an obstetrician-gynecologist, but he did house calls and treated any number of health issues in the community. Early on, I ...
Aspacytarabine, a cytarabine prodrug, was reported to be safe and effective as first-line therapy for patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) who were unfit for intensive induction chemotherapy, according to the results of a phase II study presented during the 2021 ASCO Annual Meeting.1 The...
The session’s invited discussant Surbhi Sidana, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Stanford University, said CAR T-cell therapy and bispecific antibodies targeting myeloma are emerging as potentially effective options for patients with highly refractory disease. For this population of triple...
For the challenging population of patients with multiple myeloma who have become refractory to essentially all current treatments, new approaches are much needed. Early clinical trials data suggest bispecific antibodies may help meet this need, as suggested by studies presented at the 2021 ASCO...
NEOTALA’s invited discussant, Lisa Carey, MD, the Richardson and Marilyn Jacobs Preyer Distinguished Professor in Breast Cancer Research and Deputy Director of Clinical Sciences at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, saw the findings as part of a bigger trend toward reducing the use of...
A new clinical guideline from the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) published by Kilian E. Salerno, MD, and colleagues in Practical Radiation Oncology provides guidance on the use of radiation therapy to treat adult patients with soft-tissue sarcomas. Recommendations outline optimal...
Over 90% of patients with head and neck cancer receiving curative-intent chemoradiation therapy found weekly palliative care visits to be a valuable addition to their treatment, a recent study published by Bauman et al in the Journal of Palliative Medicine found. Although palliative care is known...
Ovarian cancer carries a heavy morbidity and mortality burden, particularly in settings and regions of the globe that feature significant limitations in health-care resources. Given that ovarian cancer is more lethal than breast cancer, clinicians in resource-limited areas require guidance on the...
Created more than a decade ago, the Office of Minority Health (OMH) and the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities have a mission to advance the health of racial and ethnic minority populations through policies, programs, and partnerships at the Centers for Medicare and...
The COVID-19 pandemic may have put the world on pause, but it also showed the medical community that rapid progress is possible with focus and collaboration. During the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Virtual Oncology Policy Summit, “Defining the ‘New Normal’ 2021 and the State of...
Clinical social worker, grief expert, and university dean Erica Sirrine, PhD, has been named Director of Social Work at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. For the past 14 years, Dr. Sirrine has worked in higher education, most recently serving as Dean of the College of Behavioral and Social...
The Division of Oncology at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) has appointed Sarah Tasian, MD, as Chief of the Section of Hematologic Malignancies. Dr. Tasian succeeds Richard Aplenc, MD, PhD, MSCE, who served in this role for 13 years. Dr. Tasian will oversee a group of faculty,...
Patients with ultra-low–risk breast cancer, as classified by the MammaPrint 70-gene assay, had “excellent” long-term outcomes regardless of clinical risk or receipt of adjuvant therapy, a new analysis of the MINDACT trial has shown.1 In a separate study, a retrospective analysis of the National...
Invited study discussant Lisa Horvath, PhD, MBBS, a medical oncologist at Chris O’Brien Lifehouse, University of Sydney, Australia, commented on the results of the EORTC 1333/PEACE III trial: “It was good to see the fracture rate in the radium-223 arm did, in fact, improve. However, what I found...
Woe to the child who tastes salty from a kiss on the brow” was a forbidding prophecy from Medieval Europe, presaging unknown disease. Today, we know that salty skin is a telltale sign of cystic fibrosis in children, a disease that eluded medical identification until 1938, when an American...
Prostate cancer experts have often stated it is important to add a bone-protecting agent for patients on treatment for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. Recent evidence in support of this recommendation comes from a study presented during the 2021 ASCO Annual Meeting, confirming a...
Invited study discussant Jaishri O. Blakeley, MD, Director of the Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Neurofibromatosis Center, Baltimore, changed the title of her talk to “Finding Needles in Haystacks,” “because this is what we do with CNS [central nervous system] tumors,” she told listeners. “ALK...
Targeting mutations appears to be bearing fruit in the treatment of some difficult-to-treat tumors. For instance, in one study of adult-onset neuroblastoma, targeting ALK mutations in ALK-positive tumors demonstrated activity, even in patients who had not responded to their first ALK inhibitor. Of...
Thoracic medical oncologist Sukhmani K. Padda, MD, was recently selected to direct Thoracic Medical Oncology at Cedars-Sinai Cancer Center in Los Angeles. Dr. Padda’s appointment, following a national search, reflects her breadth of experience as a clinician and researcher in the field of thoracic...
Women account for a growing proportion of the oncology workforce. Multiple studies, however, show that women oncologists are underrepresented in leadership positions, may have significantly lower salaries than men, and may be subjected to discriminatory practices stimulated by a medical culture...
“The phase III ENGOT/GCIG study1 proved to be negative, with no advantage seen with the extension of bevacizumab treatment,” said the abstract’s invited discussant, Carol Aghajanian, MD, Chief of the Medical Gynecologic Oncology Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York. Dr....
A screening tool used to evaluate the need for endometrial cancer biopsies in women frequently misses the signs of this cancer in Black women, according to a new study published by Kemi M. Doll, MD, and colleagues in JAMA Oncology. Dr. Doll, a gynecologic oncologist at the University of Washington...
Obese patients with colorectal cancer receive lower cumulative doses of adjuvant chemotherapy relative to their body surface area than nonobese patients, according to results from a large meta-analysis reported by Slawinski et al at the ESMO World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer 2021 (Abstract...
Five-year outcomes in the APACT trial uphold the overall survival benefit with nab-paclitaxel plus gemcitabine in the adjuvant treatment of patients with resected pancreatic cancer, according to Margaret A. Tempero, MD, Director of the University of California San Francisco Pancreas Center, who...
Invited discussant of the VISION trial, Mary-Ellen Taplin, MD, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, commented on the study, noting that she was a co-investigator of the trial. “Patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer have a number of treatment options. There are 10...
Monica M. Bertagnolli, MD, FACS, FASCO, Board Chair of the Association for Clinical Oncology (ASCO), issued the following statement. “The Association for Clinical Oncology congratulates Chiquita Brooks-LaSure on her confirmation as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services ...
ASCO has approved new recommendations for the appropriate dosing of systemic anticancer agents in adults with obesity and cancer.1 The guideline update was based on evidence collected from a systematic review of the literature published between November 1, 2010, and March 27, 2020, regarding dosing ...
Perhaps my 35-year career as a surgical oncologist and researcher specializing in soft-tissue sarcomas should have prepared me to recognize the signs of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) when they first appeared a few days before Christmas in 2016, but it did not. In fact, my symptoms were so...
For the second-line treatment of advanced EGFR T790M–mutated non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the performance of osimertinib alone was not found to be different from that of osimertinib plus bevacizumab in the phase II ETOP 10-16 BOOSTER trial, reported at a European Society for Medical...
EA1131 study discussant, Melinda Telli, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, Director of the Breast Cancer Program at the Stanford Cancer Institute, and Associate Director of the Stanford Women’s Cancer Center, commented: “At this point,1 capecitabine remains preferred as...
In patients with triple-negative breast cancer who have residual disease after neoadjuvant chemotherapy, adjuvant capecitabine remains the standard of care. In the multicenter randomized noninferiority EA1131 trial, which included primarily basal tumors, noninferiority of adjuvant platinum over...
The invited discussant of the phase I trial of lisaftoclax (APG-2575), Jacqueline C. Barrientos, MD, of Hofstra/Northwell, Great Neck, New York, commented on the positive findings: “The 15 patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia [CLL] had an objective response rate of 80% and a median time to...
Invited discussant Jacqueline C. Barrientos, MD, MS, of Northwell Health Cancer Institute, Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Great Neck, New York, noted that, although both ibrutinib and venetoclax have shown superior results to chemotherapy, each drug is associated with toxicity....
In this installment of the occasional department on Global Health-Care Equity, Guest Editor, Chandrakanth Are, MBBS, MBA, FRCS, FACS, spoke with Augusto Leon, MD, a surgical oncologist and Head of the Program of Cancer at Pontifical University of Chile, Santiago. Dr. Are is JL & CJ Varner...
The first overall survival analysis of the WGS-ADAPT HER2+/HR– study, which evaluated neoadjuvant therapy in patients with hormone receptor–negative, HER2-positive disease, showed that treatment with pertuzumab and trastuzumab plus paclitaxel—or with the chemotherapy-free regimen of...
The Wistar Institute, an international biomedical research leader in cancer, immunology, and infectious diseases, recently announced the appointment of Noam Auslander, PhD, as Assistant Professor in the Molecular and Cellular Oncogenesis Program of The Wistar Institute Cancer Center. Dr....
Caryn Lerman, PhD, is the new President of the Association of American Cancer Institutes (AACI). Dr. Lerman is Director of the University of Southern California (USC) Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center in Los Angeles and Associate Dean for Cancer Programs and the H. Leslie and Elaine S. Hoffman...
The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Human Reproduction Programme (HRP)—the main instrument within the United Nations system for research in human reproduction—have launched a new guideline to help countries make faster progress, more equitably, in the screening and treatment of cervical...
Research published by Pratt et al in Annals of Surgical Oncology showed an increase in survival rates when treatment options—surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation—are completed within 38 weeks from the time of diagnosis for patients with breast cancer. Optimal Treatment Duration The observational...
The invited discussant of the Alliance A21501 findings, Rebecca A. Snyder, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Surgical Oncology at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University, Greenville, described the overall survival associated with modified FOLFIRINOX (fluorouracil [5-FU], leucovorin, ...
Because of their well-established efficacy, inhibitors of cyclin-dependent kinases 4 and 6 (CDK4/6) are the standard of care in the treatment of hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer. The question now is this: after disease progresses on a CDK4/6 inhibitor and endocrine...
Patients with primary lung cancer detected using low-dose computed tomography (CT) screening may be at reduced risk for developing brain metastases after diagnosis, according to a study published in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology. The researchers, led by Summer Han, PhD, of Stanford University...