Debbie’s Dream Foundation: Curing Stomach Cancer (DDF) recently announced its new COVID-19 Resources and Support Program. The program’s primary goal is to support, educate, and protect the already vulnerable stomach cancer community during the pandemic. The new initiative will help patients with...
The lockdown phase of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and continued measures, such as social distancing, while necessary, are disrupting cancer care in ways that will have consequences for months, if not years, to come. Studies are showing that delayed or suspended cancer treatments,...
For the first time, an inhibitor of cyclin-dependent kinases 4 and 6 (CDK4/6) has reduced the risk of invasive disease recurrence in patients with early breast cancer when combined with standard endocrine therapy, investigators reported at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Virtual...
LUNGevity Foundation, a nonprofit organization, recently announced three recipients of its 2020 Career Development Awards for lung cancer research. These awards were presented to Kathyrn Arbour, MD, Assistant Attending at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center; Carl Gay, MD, PhD, of The University...
My father died of thymic cancer when I was 14, and that’s when I decided to become an oncologist. Ironically, the first patient I diagnosed with cancer was me. In 2009, during my first week of training in hematology/oncology at the Mayo Clinic, I began having severe abdominal pain, which had...
The text and photographs 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...
The COVID-19 pandemic changed the face of U.S. health-care services in such rapid fashion that many providers were caught off guard, learning and preparing on the fly. Patients with cancer, given their multiple physical and emotional challenges, were especially vulnerable. To get a sense of the...
City of Hope scientists have combined two immunotherapies—an oncolytic virus and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy—to target solid tumors that are otherwise difficult to treat with CAR T-cell therapy alone, according to a recent study in Science Translational Medicine.1 In preclinical...
For patients with progressing HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer previously treated with trastuzumab, pertuzumab, and ado-trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1), no single regimen is an established standard of care. More than 50% of these patients will develop brain metastasis, and thus far, treatments...
As a high school student growing up in St Petersburg, Russia, I was so obsessed with chemistry that I begged my professor for extra problems to complete after school. When I rode the bus home on cold winter evenings, I traced chemical reactions with my finger in the frost on the window. By the...
“One of the most challenging oncologic situations is the diagnosis of breast cancer in a young pregnant patient,” Jacqueline Jeruss, MD, PhD, Associate Dean, Regulatory Affairs; Director of the Breast Care Center; and Professor of Surgery, Pathology, and Biomedical Engineering at the University of...
Although most patients with breast cancer are considered to have an overall excellent prognosis, 600,000 people still die annually of the disease around the world. Even in HER2-positive breast cancer, a subtype that has seen a transformation of outcomes in the past 2 decades, there’s still room for ...
Born in Watertown, Wisconsin, in 1900, Mary Woodard Lasker was introduced to the ravages of cancer when she was just 3 or 4 years old and went with her mother to visit the family’s laundress, Mrs. Belter, who had just undergone surgery for breast cancer. On the way over to Mrs. Belter’s home, Ms....
The ASCO Post is pleased to present Hematology Expert Review, an ongoing feature that occasionally quizzes readers on issues in hematology. In this installment, the authors highlight the most common type of systemic amyloidosis in the United States: immunoglobulin light chain [or amyloid light...
A long-term study of women with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) has shown that surgery to remove the tissue followed by radiotherapy may lower the risk of subsequent cancer compared to surgery alone. The study, presented at the 12th European Breast Cancer Conference by van Seijen et al (Abstract...
Benign breast disease is known to increase the chances of subsequent breast cancer. According to Spanish researchers, the way benign breast disease is detected may be an indication of how likely it is to become cancerous. The findings from the team led by Xavier Castells, MD, PhD, Head of the...
During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, fewer Black and Hispanic patients with cancer used telehealth (including phone encounters and video visits) compared to White patients, according to findings from an analysis of data from New York City hospitals. Significant disparities in the use of...
In the post-trastuzumab era, a number of U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved targeted agents for metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer are available, but there is no preferred option for third-line treatment and beyond. At the 2019 Chemotherapy Foundation Symposium, Shanu Modi, MD,...
The second interim analysis of the phase III SOPHIA trial demonstrated a significant, though modest, improvement in progression-free survival, response rate, and clinical benefit with the addition of margetuximab to chemotherapy vs trastuzumab plus chemotherapy in patients with HER2-positive...
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three scientists who have made a decisive contribution to the fight against blood-borne hepatitis, a major global health problem that causes cirrhosis and liver cancer in people around the world. Harvey J. Alter, MD; Michael Houghton, ...
Based on some unexpected negative results, oncologists using atezolizumab for metastatic triple-negative breast cancer should pair it with nab-paclitaxel, not paclitaxel. In contrast to the overall survival benefit shown for atezolizumab plus nab-paclitaxel in the previous IMpassion130...
Five years ago, as Rachel B. Issaka, MD, MAS, was beginning her second year as a gastroenterology fellow and feeling proud of the progress she was making in her training, she was suddenly confronted with an all-too-familiar slight that underrepresented minority providers may often experience. As...
MK-4830—a novel, first-in-class human IgG4 monoclonal antibody targeting the myeloid-specific anti–immunoglobulin-like transcript 4 (ILT4) receptor—administered either as a single agent or in combination with pembrolizumab was well tolerated and showed activity in heavily pretreated patients with...
Pralsetinib (also known as BLU-667) showed activity in patients with advanced RET mutation–positive medullary thyroid cancer, including high rates of durable response, disease control, and 18-month progression-free survival. These findings were presented by Hu et al at the ESMO Virtual Congress...
A large cohort study with close to 160,000 men and women reported that “recent-onset diabetes accompanied by weight loss was associated with a substantial increase in risk for pancreatic cancer and may represent a high-risk group in the general population for whom early detection strategies would...
Are you looking to provide trusted education materials to your patients and their caregivers for October cancer awareness month? Cancer.Net, ASCO’s patient information website, and ASCO Answers patient education materials have everything you need to stock your practice and inform your patients....
“Older adults form the majority of patients with cancer.” For more than 3 decades now, almost every article, presentation, or discussion related to cancer and aging started with this statement. As I entered the field of geriatric oncology, I thought that by simply stating this fact, everyone would...
Most of the newer systemic treatments for breast cancer can be safely and effectively paired with radiation therapy—although there are some exceptions, according to Mylin A. Torres, MD, the Louisa and Rand Glenn Family Chair in Breast Cancer Research and Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology at ...
She was elderly, slightly confused, and very, very worried. I was not quite sure why. It was a minor procedure—a routine angiogram, one of a dozen to be performed that morning. The risks were so small that the job of admitting her had been handed to me, then a final-year medical student, with a...
Born in Brooklyn on April 4, 1919, Ezra M. Greenspan, MD, did not stray far from his birthplace, spending most of his 5-decade medical career in New York. After graduating from New York University School of Medicine in 1942, he was accepted into the house training program at Mount Sinai Hospital...
In September 2020, Eric P. Winer, MD, was honored with the William Silen Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring Award, presented by the Office for Diversity, Inclusion & Community Partnership at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Winer is Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Director of the...
As a young girl growing up in central New Jersey, Joyce F. Liu, MD, MPH, a medical oncologist specializing in gynecologic cancers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, dreamed of becoming an astronaut. However, she realized her fear of heights and propensity for motion sickness didn’t jive with...
On July 24, 2020, brexucabtagene autoleucel, a CD19-directed genetically modified autologous T-cell immunotherapy, was granted accelerated approval for the treatment of adult patients with relapsed or refractory mantle cell lymphoma.1,2 Brexucabtagene autoleucel is approved with a Risk Evaluation...
Leading cancer scientists working with the New York Genome Center (NYGC) announced that grants are being awarded to fund six projects that address the role of ethnicity in several major cancer types, taking advantage of the diversity of patients being treated at health-care institutions throughout...
City of Hope is investigating an innovative treatment for patients with cancer and COVID-19 by repurposing leflunomide, an anti-inflammatory drug for rheumatoid arthritis that is inexpensive and has few serious side effects, in a new clinical trial. Patients treated for cancer in the past 2 years...
“Good morning! I’m Dr. Saksena. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” I wave my introduction as I enter the room. Two women sit beside each other. One of them wears a mask that reads “lipstick optional,” and the other dons a surgical mask. This is a new visit for breast cancer, but I haven’t yet deciphered ...
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...
For the first time, an inhibitor of cyclin-dependent kinases 4 and 6 (CDK4/6) has improved outcomes in patients with early breast cancer when combined with standard endocrine therapy, Stephen Johnston, MD, PhD, and colleagues reported at the ESMO Virtual Congress 2020 (Abstract LBA5_PR)....
There are approximately 25 million foreign-born immigrants living in the United States, which is more than 13% of the nation’s total population. Of these individuals, it is estimated that about 11 million are undocumented; by far, the largest group of this immigrant undocumented population is...
Higher viral loads may be associated with a greater risk of death among patients with cancer—and individuals without cancer—hospitalized with COVID-19, according to a report by Westblade et al in Cancer Cell. Among hospitalized patients infected with COVID-19, those with hematologic malignancies...
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...
In the treatment of adults with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), use of newer antibodies and de-intensification of chemotherapy have greatly improved outcomes, according to Hagop Kantarjian, MD, who has been very involved in much of the research in ALL treatment. Dr. Kantarjian, Professor and...
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many stem cell transplant centers (including guidance from the National Marrow Donor Program [NMDP]) recommend that stem cell products be frozen for preservation. However, findings from a study by Duncan Purtill, MD, and colleagues in Blood Advances suggest that the...
Of the tens of thousands of genes in cellular DNA, one group of genes is tasked with ensuring that every cell reproduces itself exactly when it divides to make new cells. Perhaps the best known of these genes are the BRCA genes, which if inherited with a significant alteration, confer a markedly...
Global oncology refers to the application of the concepts of global health to cancer and implies an approach to the practice of oncology that acknowledges the reality of limited resources in parts of the world. The Global Oncology Young Investigator Award (YIA) from ASCO and Conquer Cancer, the...
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 keeping with her Presidential theme of “Equity: Every Patient, Every Day, Everywhere,” in July, ASCO President Lori J. Pierce, MD, FASTRO, FASCO, announced the Society was joining forces with the Association of Community Cancer Centers (ACCC) to increase racial and ethnic minority participation...
The ASCO Post is pleased to reproduce installments of “Art of Oncology” as published previously in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. These articles focus on the experience of suffering from cancer or of caring for people diagnosed with cancer. They include narratives, topical essays, historical...
In this period of time, more than ever before, I feel the dichotomy of being a non-Hispanic White American vs a person of color. Through the COVID-19 pandemic, I rode the subway to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Ralph Lauren Cancer Center clinic in Harlem, where I was often the only White person on...