Soon after publication of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner) in 2010, the book’s author Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, PhD, received a call from Laura Ziskin, a film producer and cofounder of Stand Up To Cancer, who was interested in obtaining the film rights to Dr....
Acclaimed documentarian Ken Burns (The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The Central Park Five, and The Roosevelts: An Intimate History) has been making films for more than 35 years. His most recently completed project, scheduled to air on PBS this spring, is Ken Burns Presents Cancer: The Emperor of All...
Andrew K. Lee, MD, has been named Medical Director of the Texas Center for Proton Therapy. Dr. Lee launched proton therapy treatment at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center almost 9 years ago, treating the facility’s first proton therapy patient in 2006. In his new role, Dr. Lee will...
The second annual Harrington Prize for Innovation in Medicine has been awarded to oncologist/researcher Douglas R. Lowy, MD, Chief of the Laboratory of Cellular Oncology and Deputy Director of the National Cancer Institute. The Harrington Prize for Innovation in Medicine, established in 2014 by...
The Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO has announced the appointment of Claire Huang to its Board of Directors. Ms. Huang, an established leader in the fields of marketing, communications, and brand management, will serve a 3-year term. “It is a privilege to welcome Claire Huang to the Conquer...
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis has officially opened the Kay Research and Care Center. The new $198 million center houses the Eric Trump Foundation Surgery and ICU Center, and the Marlo Thomas Center for Global Education and Collaboration. The St. Jude Red Frog Events Proton...
Two years ago, ASCO collaborated with the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine to develop the Virtual Learning Collaborative, a virtual quality improvement program intended to address the complex care needs of patients with advanced cancer and the care quality for all patients with...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has expanded the existing indication for lenalidomide (Revlimid) in combination with dexamethasone to include patients newly diagnosed with multiple myeloma. Lenalidomide plus dexamethasone was previously approved in June 2006 for use in multiple myeloma...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved panobinostat (Farydak) in combination with bortezomib (Velcade) and dexamethasone for the treatment of patients with multiple myeloma. Panobinostat is the first histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitor approved to treat multiple myeloma. It is...
Due in part to the refinement of bone marrow transplantation and its many innovations, some leukemias that once were death sentences now have cure rates of up to 90%. As research in transplantation and other promising areas accelerates, we are on the verge of breaking new clinical boundaries in...
The American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine (AAHPM) has released a list of Inspiring Leaders Under 40 in the field. Eligible candidates were evaluated on involvement in AAHPM, educating others about hospice and palliative medicine, participation in charitable work, mentoring of students ...
Patrick Hwu, MD, Chair of Melanoma Medical Oncology and Sarcoma Medical Oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, has been named Division Head of Cancer Medicine. He will take over from Richard Champlin, MD, who has been acting Division Head on an ad interim basis. Dr. ...
The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) has announced 11 new fellows of the AACR Academy. The AACR Academy is an entity that recognizes individuals who have made exceptional contributions to cancer research and/or cancer-related biomedical science. Only individuals whose work has had a...
Each year in the United States, about 55,000 people will be diagnosed with head and neck cancer, and of them, about 12,000 will die of the disease. Although advances have been made in the treatment of head and neck cancer, this disease remains persistently problematic, due, in part, to the complex...
A new study1 conducted at outpatient oncology centers found that only 1% of 5,050 patient-clinician encounters resulted in a clinically inappropriate request, of which very few were complied with by physicians. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD, of the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues analyzed...
With less than 10,000 patients diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma each year and a cure rate of approximately 75% to 80%, drug development for this disease was never a priority for pharmaceutical companies. So when the antibody-drug conjugate brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris) was approved by the U.S. Food ...
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center has received more than $22 million in research grants from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT). The CPRIT awards will go toward studies in the areas of breast, skin, prostate, pancreas, colon, and lung cancers in adults,...
Using a complex and innovative study design, Budd and colleagues from the Southwest Oncology Group (SWOG) addressed, in a randomized multicenter trial,1 an issue that has been under evaluation for over 40 years—namely, what are the optimal dose and schedule for adjuvant breast cancer chemotherapy?...
The ASCO University®, the College of American Pathologists (CAP), and the Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP) recently announced their collaboration to create the Molecular Oncology Tumor Board series, an online and user-driven resource designed to help cancer care providers with the...
The inaugural 2014 Palliative Care in Oncology Symposium was held October 24 to 25 in Boston. Over 200 abstracts were presented, covering topics such as the integration of palliative care into treatment and the financial hardships facing people living with cancer. The following abstracts were among ...
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has announced its intention to shift Medicare away from the current fee-for-service model and toward a system that pays providers based on the quality—rather than the quantity—of care they provide their patients. The announcement marks the...
This free, video-based program, called Preparatory Education About Clinical Trials (PRE-ACT), helps patients and their caregivers learn about clinical trials and address barriers to participation. Direct your patients to cancer.net/preact to learn more about this online resource. Also, visit...
The 2014 ASCO Quality Care Symposium was held October 17 to 18 in Boston and featured research on combating disparities, improving end-of-life care, and finding opportunities for cost reduction. These highlights have been adapted from ASCO Quality Care Symposium Daily News (quality.asco.org/dn)....
Catherine H. Van Poznak, MD, Associate Professor of Medical Oncology at the University of Michigan, uses the skills she learned as a 2010–2011 participant in ASCO’s Leadership Development Program (LDP) to further the Society’s educational efforts through her service on the Professional Development...
James D. Murphy, MD, MS, Assistant Professor in the Department of Radiation Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, received a 2012 Conquer Cancer Foundation (CCF) of ASCO Young Investigator Award for his research focusing on access to the delivery of palliative radiation therapy. Dr....
Five decades ago, the analysis of metaphase chromosomes in the hematologic malignancies provided our first broad glimpse into the genetic anatomy of a malignant cell. Today, the advent of high-throughput methods such as next-generation sequencing, capable of surveying the entire genome, provides an ...
In two studies recently reported in The New England Journal of Medicine,1,2 whole-exome sequencing of DNA from peripheral blood cells of individuals unselected for hematologic phenotype showed that clonal hematopoiesis with somatic mutations is increasingly common with increasing age and is...
Jennifer Adair, PhD, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, has been named a 2015 Outstanding New Investigator by the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT). The award recognizes Dr. Adair’s independent research efforts to understand and improve blood stem cell–based gene...
Recent research1 conducted by Robert H. Pierce, MD, and his colleagues investigating why PD-1 (programmed cell death protein 1) inhibitors result in remarkably durable clinical remissions in some patients with melanoma, whereas others reap a short-term benefit or no benefit at all is showing that...
Treatment of anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK)–positive lung cancer has been one of the great success stories in oncology in the past decade. First discovered in lung cancer in 2007, ALK rearrangements are found in 3% to 5% of patients and define a distinct molecular subgroup of the disease with...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Orphan Drug designation for Oncolytics Biotech’s proprietary formulation of the human reovirus (Reolysin) for the treatment of ovarian and pancreatic cancer. The reovirus’s primary mode of activity is to infect and selectively target tumors...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted approval to lenvatinib (Lenvima) to treat patients with progressive, differentiated thyroid cancer whose disease progressed despite receiving radioactive iodine therapy. Lenvatinib is a tyrosine kinase inhibitor that binds to multiple sites...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Breakthrough Therapy designation to Genentech’s investigational cancer immunotherapy MPDL3280A for the treatment of PD-L1–positive non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) that has progressed during or after platinum-based chemotherapy (and an...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has accepted and granted Priority Review for Genentech’s New Drug Application (NDA) for cobimetinib in combination with vemurafenib (Zelboraf) for the treatment of people with BRAF V600 mutation–positive advanced melanoma. The FDA will make a decision on...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted accelerated approval to palbociclib (Ibrance) in combination with letrozole for the treatment of postmenopausal women with estrogen receptor–positive, HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer who have not yet received an endocrine-based therapy....
The approval of multiple inhibitors of either the VEGF or mTOR pathway provided an incremental advance in the treatment of metastatic clear cell renal cancer. However, the agents have several important limitations: For example, the optimal clinical effect appears to be dependent on chronic...
At the 56th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition, attendance at many multiple myeloma sessions outnumbered the room size, as data from studies of novel agents, such as the monoclonal antibodies, and from key trials, such as ASPIRE, drew crowds. The ASCO Post covered...
Session moderator Laura A. Dawson, MD, of the University of Toronto, commented on this study by Dr. Ross and colleagues for The ASCO Post: “Moving forward, I think we need to change the way we make treatment decisions, no question. Treatment based on profiling is the way of the future. Dr. Ross’...
Since 1990, the annual global death toll from cancer has risen about 40%, and that number is projected to increase from the current level of approximately 8 million cancer deaths per year to more than 13 million by 2030. The poorer, resource-challenged regions of the world will suffer a...
Precision medicine—and its promise to revolutionize how we understand disease and care for our patients—is a concept that oncology has understood and embraced for well over a decade. But millions of Americans recently heard about the concept for the first time when President Obama announced a...
A study presented at the 2015 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium calls into question the use of active surveillance in patients with intermediate-risk prostate cancer. Patients with intermediate-risk prostate cancer managed with active surveillance had almost a four times higher risk of prostate...
The likelihood of impending death of patients with advanced cancer “is one of those questions that many people want to know about, but they are too afraid to ask,” David Hui, MD, MSc, said in an interview with The ASCO Post. Dr. Hui is lead author of a study, published in Cancer, on clinical signs...
In a recently published study of patients with advanced cancer whose status was systematically documented twice a day, from the time of admission to a palliative care unit until death or discharge, investigators identified eight physical signs associated with death within 3 days. Taken together...
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 following essay by Eric M. Genden, MD, is adapted from The Big Casino: America’s Best Cancer Doctors Share Their Most Powerful Stories, which was coedited by Stan Winokur, MD, and Vincent Coppola and published in May 2014. The book is available on Amazon.com and thebigcasino.org. There’s...
Following news of Dr. Varmus’ planned departure from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), ASCO issued the following statement: ASCO is enormously grateful for the service and leadership of Harold Varmus, MD, as Director of the National Cancer Institute [NCI]. During Dr. Varmus’ tenure, the...
Harold Varmus, MD, who has led the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for nearly 5 years, has announced that he will step down from his post, effective March 31, 2015. “It has been our great fortune to have Dr. Varmus at the helm of the NCI,” said NIH...
MARCH Personalised Cancer Medicine and Big Data Analysis – 7th International Conference of Contemporary OncologyMarch 25-27 • Poznań, Poland For more information: www.termedia.pl/Konferencje?Invitation&e=372&p=2787 Society of Surgical Oncology Annual MeetingMarch 25-28 • Houston, Texas For ...
A Century of Progress The text and photographs on these pages represent the establishment of oncology as a viable medical specialty during the late 1800s and showcase the early medical advances and treatments in cancer. The images and captions are excerpted from a four-volume series of books titled ...
Patricia Ganz, MD, Director of Cancer Prevention and Control Research at the Jonsson Cancer Center of UCLA, and collaborators Apple and Sage Bionetworks, recently announced the launch of “Share the Journey: Mind, Body and Wellness after Breast Cancer,” a patient-centered mobile application (app)...