Findings comparing the mutational landscape in pregnant and nonpregnant patients with breast cancer that sought to define whether the disease may have a different biology in pregnant women were reported by Loibl et al at the 2017 IMPAKT Breast Cancer Conference, held in Brussels (Abstract...
Researchers have identified a subtype of triple-negative breast cancer that may be responsive to inhibition of cyclin-dependent kinases 4 and 6 (CDK4/6), according to findings presented by Asghar et al at the 2017 IMPAKT Breast Cancer Conference, held in Brussels (Abstract 44P). This study also...
Baseline levels of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) in pretreatment biopsies from patients with HER2-positive breast cancer are significantly associated with pathologic complete response rates following neoadjuvant chemotherapy plus anti-HER2 agents (trastuzumab [Herceptin], lapatinib...
This year, the World Health Organization (WHO) will launch a pilot project for prequalifying biosimilar medicines, a step toward making some of the most expensive treatments for cancer more widely available in low- and middle-income countries. The decision comes after a 2-day meeting in Geneva...
As reported by Katherine S. Virgo, PhD, MBA, of Emory University, and colleagues in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, ASCO has issued a provisional clinical opinion on second-line hormonal therapy for chemotherapy-naive castration-resistant prostate cancer. The provisional clinical opinion applies...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Kurian et al, surveys in a population-based sample of patients recently diagnosed with breast cancer indicate that many undergo genetic risk testing without seeing a genetics counselor and that many with BRCA1/2 variants of uncertain significance...
American Medical Association (AMA) President Andrew W. Gurman, MD, released the following statement today after the U.S. House of Representatives passed the American Health Care Act: “The bill passed by the House today will result in millions of Americans losing access to quality,...
Winner of the American Brain Tumor Association Young Investigator Award Anthony C. Wang, MD, a neurosurgeon at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Mattel Children’s Hospital and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, presented his research findings on desmoplastic infantile...
Spanish-speaking patients with cancer have new tools to help them understand treatment options for their disease. The American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) has released a series of Spanish-language patient videos on radiation therapy for cancer, including breast, prostate, lung, brain,...
According to a study by Skinner et al, the primary cause of death in patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma is local treatment failure. Although human papillomavirus (HPV)-positive head and neck squamous cell carcinoma is sensitive to radiation, HPV-negative tumors are...
According to a study reported by Hamada et al in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, postdiagnosis aspirin use was associated with improved survival vs nonuse among patients with colorectal cancer who have lower, but not higher, tumor levels of CD274 (programmed cell death 1 ligand 1; PD-L1). Study...
In a phase III trial (NRG Oncology/Gynecologic Oncology Group GOG-0213 trial) reported in The Lancet Oncology, Coleman et al found evidence of an overall survival advantage with the addition of bevacizumab (Avastin) to paclitaxel-carboplatin in recurrent platinum-sensitive ovarian cancer. The...
In a study reported in JAMA, Ali H. Mokdad, PhD, and colleagues from the University of Washington, Seattle, found that cancer mortality rates in the United States dropped from 240.2 to 192.0 per 100,000 population between 1980 and 2014.1 Mortality rates varied widely among U.S. counties for...
In a separate interview, George Ansstas, MD, a medical neuro-oncologist at Siteman Cancer Center, Washington University, St. Louis, discussed his experience in treating patients with tumor-treating fields. He has treated about 35 patients with glioblastoma in the first-line setting and 20 with...
“I am intrigued by this study. I have no idea by which molecular mechanism this [tumor-treating fields therapy] works, but the data are the data,” said George Demetri, MD, of Dana-Farber Cancer Center, Boston. Dr. Demetri moderated the press conference where these data were discussed. “A panoply...
Using a novel approach called tumor-treating fields—which involves the delivery of low-intensity electric fields to the brain by a patient-operated device—along with standard-of-care temozolomide therapy improved overall survival and progression-free survival vs temozolomide alone in patients with...
This Clinical Trials Resource Guide includes a selection of actively recruiting clinical trials of cyclin-dependent kinase 4/6 (CDK4/6) inhibitors, including palbociclib, ribociclib, and abemaciclib in multiple tumor types. All of the studies here and many others are listed on the National...
The investigational cyclin D–dependent kinase (CDK) 4/6 inhibitor abemaciclib was recently evaluated in several solid tumor types in a phase I multicenter trial.1 Given primarily as a single agent and with continuous dosing, abemaciclib showed encouraging early signals of clinical activity not only ...
Geoffrey I. Shapiro, MD, PhD, Director of the Early Drug Development Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, explained the current research initiatives involving cyclin D–dependent kinase (CDK) 4/6 inhibitors. Mechanism of Action How do CDK4/6 inhibitors work at the cellular level in...
The robust progression-free survival benefits achieved with the use of the CDK4/6 inhibitors palbociclib or ribociclib in the metastatic setting provided the impetus to study these agents in early-stage breast cancer. Adjuvant studies are underway, but they take time to mature. For evaluating...
The novel mechanism of action of drugs that inhibit the cyclin D–dependent kinases CDK4 and CDK6 has prompted effective new treatment strategies. Although the bulk of the data supporting the use of selective CDK4/6 inhibitors is currently in breast cancer, patients with other tumor types are...
This CE/CME/CEU-accredited supplement is jointly provided by To earn credit/contact hours, you must read all the articles in this supplement and then go to: https://education.annenberg.net/cdk46inhibition Release date: May 10, 2017 Expiration date: May 10, 2018Annenberg Center for Health...
In a study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Jamal-Hanjani et al found that early stage non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) tumors were characterized by widespread intratumor genomic heterogeneity and that increased subclonal copy-number alterations in this context were...
In an article in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Sasse et al reported long-term follow-up of German Hodgkin Study Group trials in early-stage favorable and unfavorable Hodgkin lymphoma. The updates cover the HD7 and HD10 trials in favorable disease and the HD8 and HD11 trials in unfavorable...
Men may need more frequent lung cancer screening than women, according to research to be presented by Koo et al at the 2017 European Lung Cancer Conference (ELCC). The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends annual screening for lung cancer with low-dose computed tomography (CT) in adults...
Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have found that babies born to mothers who underwent fertility treatments may be at increased risk of developing types of pediatric malignancies and neoplasms. The study, published by Wainstock et al in the American Journal of Obstetrics &...
On May 1, Congress announced a bipartisan 2017 budget deal that contains a $2 billion increase in medical research funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including $475 million more for the National Cancer Institute. The budget also maintains funding for cancer control programs at the ...
Higher costs for complex cancer surgery may be an indicator of worse—rather than better—quality of care, according to new research by experts at Rice University and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Their findings are published by Ho et al in Surgery, and provide...
On April 28, the European Commission approved nivolumab (Opdivo) as monotherapy for the treatment of squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck (SCCHN) in adults with disease progression on or after platinum-based therapy. Nivolumab is the first and only immuno-oncology treatment that has...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Mark G. Kris, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and colleagues, ASCO and Cancer Care Ontario (CCO) have issued an update to the ASCO/CCO clinical practice guideline on adjuvant systemic therapy and adjuvant radiation therapy for stage...
A propensity score analysis in a prospectively maintained database at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) has shown that use of perioperative hepatic arterial infusion pump chemotherapy after complete resection of colorectal liver metastases is associated with a marked improvement in...
Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted accelerated approval to durvalumab (Imfinzi) for the treatment of patients with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial carcinoma who have disease progression during or following platinum-containing chemotherapy or who have disease...
Declines in prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing that came after changes in government screening guidelines have abated in recent years, according to a new study. In JAMA Internal Medicine, American Cancer Society (ACS) investigators led by Stacy A. Fedewa, PhD, wrote that about 1 in 3 men aged...
Mayo Clinic researchers have discovered that surgery could more than double life expectancy for many patients with late-stage kidney cancer, giving them anywhere from 2 to almost 10 years more than they would have without the surgery. A paper published by Zaid et al in The Journal of Urology found...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Renfro et al have derived a nomogram for predicting early mortality in metastatic colorectal cancer using data from more than 20,000 patients in the ARCAD (Aide et Recherche en Cancérologie Digestive) database. Study Details The analysis...
Nivolumab (Opdivo) has been found to produce durable responses in patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma, in the phase I/II CheckMate 040 trial. These findings were reported in The Lancet by El-Khoueiry et al. Study Details The phase I/II dose-escalation and dose-expansion trial was...
In the international phase III REMARC trial reported by Thieblemont et al in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, lenalidomide (Revlimid) maintenance was found to prolong progression-free survival vs placebo in older patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma responding to first-line R-CHOP...
On April 28, 2017, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted accelerated approval to brigatinib (Alunbrig) for the treatment of patients with metastatic anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK)-positive non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who have had disease progression on or are...
Although the duration and magnitude of clinical response are unpredictable in patients with ALK-rearranged non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treated with crizotinib (Xalkori), eventually all patients develop resistance to the drug. A study by Pailler et al evaluating whether circulating...
On April 28, 2017, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved midostaurin (Rydapt) for the treatment of adult patients with newly diagnosed acute myeloid leukemia (AML) who are FLT3 mutation–positive, as detected by an FDA-approved test, in combination with standard cytarabine and...
Although cancer immunotherapy can produce dramatic responses, only a minority of patients benefit from such therapy. Being able to differentiate treated responders from nonresponders early in the course of therapy would help to triage nonresponding patients away from ineffective therapies, reducing ...
A randomized trial, reported by Maly et al in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, has shown that having an individualized survivorship care plan in place was associated with increased physician implementation of recommended breast cancer survivorship care among low-income, predominantly Latina breast ...
A UK phase II trial comparing pazopanib (Votrient) with paclitaxel after failure of platinum-based therapy in patients with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial carcinoma was stopped early due to futility. These results were reported by Jones et al in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Two...
Second cancers in children as well as adolescents and young adults (AYAs) are far deadlier than they are in older adults and may partially account for the relatively poor outcomes of cancer patients aged 15 to 39 years overall, according to a new study by University of California (UC), Davis...
On April 27, the investigational next-generation ALK/ROS1 tyrosine kinase inhibitor lorlatinib was granted Breakthrough Therapy designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of patients with anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK)-positive metastatic non–small cell...
A new laboratory technique developed by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and other institutions can rapidly test the effectiveness of treatments for life-threatening breast cancer metastases in bone. Findings of this research were published by Wang et al in Nature Communications....
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has expanded the approved use of regorafinib (Stivarga) to include treatment of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma who have been previously treated with the drug sorafenib (Nexavar). This is the first new FDA-approved treatment for liver cancer in...
Patients with lung cancer treated with programmed cell death protein 1/programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-1/PD-L1) checkpoint inhibitors may be at increased risk of adverse events after receiving the seasonal influenza vaccination, according to the first study measuring this effect. The results, to ...
A new position statement, jointly published by seven international and European organizations, identifies fracture-related risk factors in patients treated with aromatase inhibitors and outlines key management strategies to help prevent bone loss and related fractures. It was published by Hadji et...
In newly updated clinical guidelines from the Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO), researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, along with an interdisciplinary team of colleagues at The University of Texas MD Anderson...