The FIRST trial—reported by Benboubker and colleagues in The New England Journal of Medicine and summarized in this issue of The ASCO Post (page 93)—is a landmark study.1 It is one of the largest randomized trials in multiple myeloma ever conducted. More importantly, it is a well-designed trial...
In a related commentary, Kiran K. Turaga, MD, MPH, of the Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, writes: “In the setting of these congratulatory reports of a successful public health screening program, this report from Bailey et al is rather unsettling.” “Nevertheless, assuming that this...
While the incidence of colorectal cancer in people 50 years or older has declined, the incidence among people 20 to 49 years has increased, according to a report published online recently by JAMA Surgery.1 From 1998 through 2006, the incidence of colorectal cancer declined 3% per year in men and...
David G. Nathan, MD, President Emeritus of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Physician-in-Chief Emeritus of Boston Children’s Hospital, was recently honored as the inaugural recipient of the Boston Children’s Hospital Lifetime Impact Award at the Hospital’s second Annual Global Pediatric Innovation...
Whether it’s the approaching end of the tax year or simply the altruism of the season, many donors prefer to make charitable gifts in November and December. This year, those donors who have a passion for conquering cancer have an added incentive to consider a tax deductible year-end gift to the...
As part of ASCO’s 50th anniversary, the Society has published a weekly series on special moments in its history. In this edition of The ASCO Post, we revisit a unique time when ASCO’s history intersected with major world events. To read the entire series, visit the “News and Views” page on...
ASCO’s latest video series, Navigating Challenges: Perspectives from Survivors and Doctors, available at www.cancer.net/navigatingchallenges, offers information for people newly diagnosed with cancer who are facing real-world barriers to high-quality cancer care. In the four featured videos, health ...
ASCO has submitted comments to the National Institutes of Health regarding the role of data standards in biomedical science. The comments were in response to a Request for Information from the National Cancer Institute, Input on Information Resources for Data-Related Standards Widely Used in...
Since 2003, the Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO has recognized more than 100 high-quality, community-based clinical research sites through the Clinical Trial Participation Award (CTPA). The program has been generously supported by the Coalition of Cancer Cooperative Groups for the past decade....
The ASCO Nominating Committee has selected Daniel F. Hayes, MD, FASCO, and Patrick J. Loehrer, Sr, MD, FASCO, as candidates for the position of 2015-2016 President-Elect (2016-2017 President). In the abridged interviews below, the candidates discuss their vision for the Society and their leadership ...
A secondary analysis of the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project B-32 trial1 indicates that radiation therapy does not increase the incidence of lymphedema in patients with node-negative breast cancer, according to research presented at the American Society for Radiation Oncology’s...
Patients who received postoperative radiation therapy lived an average of 4 months longer when compared to the patients who had the same disease site, tumor histology, and treatment criteria and who did not receive postoperative radiotherapy, according to research presented at the 2014 Chicago...
Now that clinicians know to “think beyond KRAS” in metastatic colorectal cancer—and test for all RAS mutations, not just those in exon 2—it seems this is still not sufficient for selecting the best drugs. At the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2014 Congress in Madrid, a proffered paper ...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved new labeling for morphine sulfate and naltrexone hydrochloride extended-release capsules. The drug, marketed as Embeda, is an opioid analgesic used to treat pain severe enough to require daily, around-the-clock, long-term opioid treatment and ...
Pembrolizumab is a humanized monoclonal antibody that blocks the interaction between PD-1 and its ligands, PD-L1 and PD-L2. By binding to the PD-1 receptor and blocking the interaction with the receptor ligands, pembrolizumab releases the PD-1 pathway–mediated inhibition of the immune response,...
To kick off the second national Turning the Tide Against Cancer conference, sponsored by the American Association for Cancer Research, Personalized Medicine Coalition (PMC), and Feinstein Kean Healthcare, Edward Abrahams, PhD, President of PMC, noted that U.S. health-care costs are unsustainable...
More than 150 oral and poster presentations were featured at the 2014 Breast Cancer Symposium, held September 4–6 in San Francisco. The multidisciplinary meeting is sponsored by ASCO, the American Society of Breast Disease, American Society of Breast Surgeons, American Society for Radiation...
The use of targeted therapies in indolent non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) is a burgeoning area. New targeted therapies directed at the cell surface, intracellular pathways, and the microenvironment are being studied for relapsed indolent NHL. These treatments, if validated in large randomized trials,...
ASCO has issued an endorsement of the American Urological Association (AUA)/American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) guideline on the use of adjuvant and salvage radiotherapy after prostatectomy, which was based on a systematic review of medical literature. The ASCO endorsement was published ...
Over the past 50 years, there have been incredible changes in the field of colorectal cancer,” Emily K. Bergsland, MD, noted in opening the colorectal cancer session at the Best of ASCO meeting in Chicago. Dr. Bergsland is a gastrointestinal oncologist at the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive...
Two phase III studies presented at the Best of ASCO meeting in Chicago shed more light on the role of maintenance therapy in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer undergoing first-line treatment with oxaliplatin-based chemotherapy. The two studies compared maintenance therapy with bevacizumab...
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) has released a new report, “Researching Cancer Medicines: Setbacks and Stepping Stones,” which highlights the number of investigational cancer medicines that did not succeed in clinical trials and how these so-called failures are a...
Magee-Womens Hospital of University of Pittsburgh is offering its patients the FDA-cleared breast cancer test assessing a woman’s risk of cancer recurrence by providing a risk category and numerical score. The hospital is the first in the tri-state area (Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia) to offer...
Improvements over the past 3 decades in 5-year survival rates for patients with osteosarcoma and Ewing’s sarcoma owe a lot to chemotherapy clinical trials conducted by the Children’s Oncology Group (COG), Mark Agulnik, MD, acknowledged at the Best of ASCO meeting in Chicago. Dr. Agulnik is...
Targeted agents have started to make inroads in sarcoma therapies, and gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) is the poster child for this success,” Mark Agulnik, MD, stated in summarizing progress in GIST and other sarcomas at the Best of ASCO meeting in Chicago. Dr. Agulnik is Associate Professor, ...
Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell has announced an initiative that will fund successful applicants who work directly with medical providers to rethink and redesign their practices, moving from systems driven by quantity of care to ones focused on patients’ health outcomes, and...
New studies reported at ASCO’s 2014 Quality Care Symposium provided insight on the role social factors play in cancer treatment disparities, as well as effective approaches to improving the quality of care. “The research presented [here] highlights how the conditions facing people living with...
It turns out that in addition to treatment-related toxicity, cancer patients commonly experience “financial toxicity,” a phrase that is increasingly coming into parlance in the cancer community. Patients should be assessed for financial toxicity as early as possible following diagnosis so that they ...
The “graying of America” poses increasing challenges for the cancer community in terms of rising numbers of cases of cancer and costs associated with geriatric care. The scope of this problem and potential solutions were explored by Andrew E. Chapman, DO, FACP, at the ASCO Quality Care Symposium in ...
Over the past decade, there has been growing concern in the oncology community about overdiagnosis and overtreatment of cancers that prove to be indolent and nonlethal, resulting in unnecessary and sometimes harmful procedures. At this year’s ASCO Quality Care Symposium in Boston, this important...
Overutilization of health-care interventions has become a prime target of efforts to rein in health-care costs. Overtreatment of cancer patients is associated with a number of common harms to the patient—not just financial harm to the health-care system. At the recent ASCO Quality Care Symposium in ...
The image of aging that Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, PhD, expresses in his essay, “Why I Hope to Die at 75,” in the October issue of The Atlantic,1 is bleak indeed and one that has contributed mightily to the negative views of aging imbedded in our society. But I refute his description of growing older as...
Advances in science and medicine have led to humans living longer than at any other time in history. According to a new report1 on mortality from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, life expectancy in the United States is at an all-time high of...
The treatment of acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL) represents one of the major triumphs in the field of hematologic malignancies. With either the vitamin A derivative all-trans retinoic acid (ATRA) combined with anthracycline-based chemotherapy or ATRA plus arsenic trioxide (Trisenox),...
The IMPRESS trial asks a simple question: Should you continue an [epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) tyrosine kinase inhibitor] while you switch to chemotherapy,” said Solange Peters, MD, PhD, Head of the Thoracic Malignancies Program at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, at the European ...
The 10th anniversary of the Lilly Oncology On Canvas Art Competition was celebrated with the presentation of awards and display of winning entries in New York’s Grand Central Terminal on October 23, 2014. First-, second-, and third-place winners were published in the November 15 issue of The ASCO...
As medical oncologists working in chemotherapy utilization management (Oncology Analytics, Inc), my colleagues and I find ourselves daily in the center of the drug-cost maelstrom. While it is encouraging to see that more attention is being paid in the popular and medical press to this...
I read with great interest your interview with Virginia LeBaron, PhD, APRN, about barriers to adequate pain control (“Despite Growing Awareness, the Global Crisis of Untreated Cancer Pain Persists,” The ASCO Post, October 15, 2014). Having served as the medical director of a hospice, I am...
Neeraj Agarwal, MD, a Huntsman Cancer Institute investigator and Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Utah, has received the 2014 Cancer Clinical Investigator Team Leadership Award from the National Cancer Institute (NCI). This highly competitive award recognizes exceptional cancer...
The National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) has published the 20th annual edition of the NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology (NCCN Guidelines) for Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC), one of the eight original NCCN Guidelines published in November 1996. “Since the first NCCN...
Screening for thyroid cancer should be discouraged to prevent an “epidemic of diagnosis”—like the one occurring in South Korea—from happening in the United States and other countries, according to the authors of an analysis of the South Korean screening program. That study was published in The New...
An “epidemic of diagnosis” of thyroid cancer is occurring in South Korea and “absolutely could happen here,” according to H. Gilbert Welch, MD, MPH, Professor of Medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, Hanover, New Hampshire. Dr. Welch is coauthor of an article...
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center announced that it has named D. Gary Gilliland, MD, PhD, an expert in cancer genetics and precision medicine as its new President and Director. He will take the helm as the Center’s new leader on January 2. Dr. Gilliland comes to Fred Hutchinson from the...
Susan T. Mayne, PhD, C-EA, Winslow Professor of Epidemiology; Associate Director for Population Sciences at Yale Cancer Center; and Chair of the Department of Chronic Disease Epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health, has been appointed to the position of Center Director of the Center for Food...
Nicholas J. Petrelli, MD, FACS, the Bank of America endowed Medical Director of Christiana Care’s Helen F. Graham Cancer Center & Research Institute, Newark, Delaware, received the 2014 Clinical Research Award from the Association of Community Cancer Centers (ACCC) in recognition of his...
Members of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) have elected Rolf-Detlef Treede, MD, PhD, as the organization’s new president. Dr. Treede is Chair of Neurophysiology and Managing Director of the Center for Biomedicine and Medical Technology Mannheim at Heidelberg University in ...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today approved hydrocodone bitartrate (Hysingla ER), an extended-release opioid analgesic to treat pain severe enough to require daily, around-the-clock, long-term opioid treatment and for which alternative treatment options are inadequate. The product...
ASCO Answers: Managing the Cost of Cancer Care explains the various costs associated with cancer treatment, including health-care coverage through the Affordable Care Act. It also provides a list of financial resources available to help offset expenses related to care and tips for organizing...
The bronchoscope was first used for extracting foreign bodies and the evaluation of infectious processes, especially abscesses. By the end of the twentieth century, the bronchoscope had been determined the single most useful tool for accurate diagnosis of lung cancer. It allowed for the collection...
When Thomas Alva Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park, heard of Roentgen’s discovery of the x-ray, he directed his research staff to create x-ray tubes and better screens on which to view the images. Edison owned America’s first industrial research laboratory and could easily supply the know-how,...