A study of 100 people with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) receiving chemotherapy found that patient and physician perceptions of treatment risk and the likelihood of a cure varied widely. Overall, patients tended to overestimate both the risk of dying due to treatment and the likelihood of a cure....
An analysis from the phase III AZURE trial has shown that MAF-negative status was associated with a benefit and MAF-positive status, with a detriment of adjuvant zoledronic acid in early breast cancer. The analysis was reported by Coleman et al in The Lancet Oncology. Study Details The current...
As reported by Long et al in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, a 5-year landmark analysis of patients receiving dabrafenib (Tafinlar) and trametinib (Mekinist) for BRAF V600–mutant metastatic melanoma shows persistent overall and progression-free survival benefits. Study Details The...
In the September 25, 2017, issue of The ASCO Post, page 1, the date of approval was cited incorrectly for the genetically engineered T-cell therapy tisagenlecleucel (Kymriah). The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved tisagenlecleucel on August 30, 2017. The T-cell therapeutic is approved for...
Moffitt Cancer Center has made a lasting commitment to the prevention and cure of cancer, working fervently in the areas of patient care, research, and education to advance further in fighting this disease, according to Alan F. List, MD, Moffitt’s President and Chief Executive Officer. Dr. List,...
In 1988, 38-year-old Rita Lawrence found herself in a desperate situation. The lymphoma she’d been battling had recurred after 2 years of remission. She’d endured multiple rounds of tough chemotherapy, but it couldn’t stave off the swiftly growing tumors. When she learned of a radioimmunotherapy...
“Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination coverage lags behind coverage for the other vaccines recommended for preteens,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).1 A recent report about vaccination coverage in the United States among adolescents aged 13 to 17 found that...
Although a cancer diagnosis is daunting at any age, adolescents and young adults (AYAs) with the disease often face unique challenges and are at risk for poor psychosocial outcomes than older patients. A randomized study investigating whether a brief, age-appropriate, skills-based intervention...
Although the use of electronic health records in oncology care has led to improved care for patients, results from a new study show that oncologists need to be cautious about using computers during exam room visits, especially for patients with advanced cancer. The randomized study compared...
THE U.S. FOOD & DRUG ADMINISTRATION (FDA) and the Oncology Center of Excellence (OCE) will host a complimentary public workshop, Assessment of Cardiovascular Toxicities in Immuno-Oncology Trials, on December 1. ASCO is supporting the workshop with the American College of Cardiology (ACC), the...
ASCO’S BOOKLET on Managing Cancer-Related Pain helps you work together with your patients to develop an individualized plan for pain management before they start treatment. Patients and their caregivers will learn about the importance of pain relief, including its causes, how it is diagnosed, and...
Applications are now being accepted for ASCO’s Quality Training Program (QTP), a comprehensive program designed to train oncology health-care providers to investigate and implement data-driven quality improvement, as well as manage clinical and nonclinical processes and outcomes. The program...
APPLICATIONS ARE now being accepted for ASCO’s 2018 Health Policy Fellowship program. The Health Policy Fellowship aims to provide oncology fellows and early-career physicians with the necessary skills to shape cancer policy and to help increase the involvement of ASCO members in policy, advocacy,...
Oncology luminaries. Thought leaders. The soul of chemotherapy. These are just a few of the phrases used to describe Emil Frei, MD, FASCO, Emil J Freireich, MD, FASCO, James F. Holland, MD, FASCO, Georges Mathé, MD, and their historic contributions to the world of oncology. Inspired by these...
WOMEN WHO CONQUER CANCER (WWCC) funds the promising careers of the best and brightest women researchers through the Conquer Cancer Foundation’s Young Investigator Award (YIA) program. Thanks to the generosity of supporters, five awards were granted in 2017. Right now, gifts to the WWCC Endowment...
ASCO has created a series of clinical practice guidelines to benefit clinicians, public health leaders, and policymakers in all resource settings. These resource-stratified guidelines help medical professionals outline appropriate methods of treatment and care based on the level of health-care...
Research presented at the 9th World Congress of Melanoma supports the updated guideline recommendation that sentinel lymph node biopsy be performed in more patients newly diagnosed with melanoma, as it has the potential to save lives due to the information the procedure provides. This biopsy can...
OncoSec Medical Incorporated presented new clinical data on ImmunoPulse IL-12 (intratumoral pIL-12 [tavokinogene telseplasmid] with electroporation) at the 9th World Congress of Melanoma. “We are excited to share updated data from our phase II clinical monotherapy trial with ImmunoPulse ...
BerGenBio ASA announced that the randomized phase Ib/II clinical study of the Axl inhibitor BGB324 in combination with either the MAP kinase inhibitors trametinib (Mekinist) plus dabrafenib (Tafinlar) or the immune checkpoint inhibitor pembrolizumab (Keytruda) in patients with advanced melanoma is...
On October 17, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has accepted a supplemental Biologics License Application (sBLA) for durvalumab (Imfinzi) for the treatment of patients with locally advanced (stage III) unresectable non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) whose disease has not progressed ...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Ho et al found that tumor-based enhancer of zeste homolog 2 (EZH2) gene or protein expression was independently predictive of prognosis in localized clear cell renal cell carcinoma. EZH2 is a chromatin remodeler implicated in the pathogenesis of...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Wang et al have developed a model for predicting risk of subsequent central nervous system (CNS) tumors in survivors of childhood cancer. Study Details In the study, matched childhood cancer survivors with (n = 82) and without (n = 228) subsequent...
THE U.S. FOOD and Drug Administration (FDA) has awarded numerous new clinical trial research grants, totaling more than $22 million over the next 4 years, to boost the development of products for patients with rare diseases. These new grants were awarded to principal investigators from academia and ...
WITH THE INCLUSION of proteasome inhibitors and immunomodulatory agents first into salvage and then as components of first-line, consolidation, and maintenance regimens, response rates, depth of response, and median progression-free and overall survival have all improved for patients suffering...
AT A PRESPECIFIED interim analysis, the phase III ENDEAVOR trial has shown a significant overall survival benefit for carfilzomib (Kyprolis) vs bortezomib (Velcade) in patients with relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma, as reported by Meletios A. Dimopoulos, MD, of the National and Kapodistrian...
IN A LARGE single-institution study reported in the Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, Tobin Strom, MD, and colleagues found that regional radiotherapy was associated with a reduced risk of regional recurrence in patients with node-positive cutaneous melanoma, including those...
AS REPORTED BY David P. Carbone, MD, PhD, of The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center, Columbus, and colleagues in The New England Journal of Medicine, the phase III CheckMate 026 trial has shown no progression-free survival benefit for first-line nivolumab (Opdivo) vs platinum-based...
Honoring National Cancer Institute researchers Douglas R. Lowy, MD, and John T. Schiller, PhD, with the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for advances in technology that enabled the development of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines to prevent cervical cancer and other tumors caused by ...
IN A PHASE III trial reported by Ramaswamy Govindan, MD, of Washington University School of Medicine, and colleagues in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the addition of first-line ipilimumab (Yervoy) to paclitaxel/carboplatin did not improve overall survival in patients with advanced squamous...
AS REPORTED BY Paul J. Hesketh, MD, of Lahey Hospital and Medical Center, Burlington, Massachusetts, and colleagues in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, ASCO has updated its clinical practice guideline on the use of antiemetics in patients with cancer.1 The update was based on an expert panel...
IN A RETROSPECTIVE pooled analysis of the CheckMate 069 and 067 studies reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Dirk Schadendorf, MD, of the University Hospital Essen and the German Cancer Consortium, and colleagues found little difference in the efficacy of combined nivolumab (Opdivo) and...
In the randomized phase IIB DETERMINE trial, the cytotoxic T-lymphocyte–associated protein 4 (CTLA-4) inhibitor tremelimumab did not improve overall survival vs placebo as second- or third-line treatment of relapsed malignant mesothelioma. These findings were reported in The Lancet Oncology by...
In a retrospective analysis reported in JAMA Oncology, Georgina V. Long, MBBS, PhD, of the Melanoma Institute Australia, North Sydney, and colleagues found that a substantial proportion of patients with advanced melanoma derived benefit from continued nivolumab (Opdivo) treatment after Response...
Edward E. Partridge, MD, has been named Chief Medical Officer of the Birmingham, Alabama–based Guideway Care, according to an announcement by Craig Parker, the company’s President and Chief Executive Officer. Dr. Partridge, a gynecologic oncologist, is highly regarded for his work to improve...
The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) awarded Julie R. Palmer, ScD, the AACR Distinguished Lecture on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities, funded by Susan G. Komen. Dr. Palmer was recognized for her work as a cancer epidemiologist who has devoted most of her career to...
THE U.S. FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION (FDA), in partnership with international regulatory and law enforcement agencies, recently took action against more than 500 websites that illegally sell potentially dangerous, unapproved versions of prescription medicines, including opioids, antibiotics, and...
Neuro-oncologist Howard A. Fine, MD, of Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian, will receive a 5-year, $6 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Pioneer Award for brain cancer research. The award will support Dr. Fine’s approach to modeling deadly brain cancers in the...
PRESS CONFERENCE MODERATOR Markus Joerger, MD, PhD, of St. Gallen Cancer Center, Switzerland, indicated that prior to the current study, it was unclear whether chemotherapy followed by surgery would be superior to chemoradiotherapy. “I think we all agree that it has been confirmed as the standard...
I’ve always had dense breasts and avoided doing breast self-exams because I couldn’t tell if the lumpiness I was feeling was something serious or merely normal fibrous tissue. Instead I relied on my yearly mammogram to spot any early signs of cancer. Four years ago, I was once again relieved to...
THE FIRST FORMAL comparison of two acceptable approaches to locally advanced cervical cancer has concluded that standard chemoradiotherapy is preferable to neoadjuvant chemotherapy plus surgery. The findings confirm what most specialists have believed to be the optimal treatment. The results came ...
No matter what a person does in life, for good and bad, his or her inherited genetic makeup follows along the way. Such was the case with British journalist Sarah Gabriel, who inherited the BRCA1 mutation from her mother, who died of ovarian cancer when Ms. Gabriel was in college. Much of her...
BASED ON THE RESULTS of COMBI-AD1 and CheckMate 238,2 invited discussant Alexander Eggermont, MD, PhD, Professor of Oncology at Gustave Roussy in Paris, commented: “It’s a good day for melanoma!” In COMBI-AD, treatment with the combination of dabrafenib (Tafinlar) and trametinib (Mekinist)...
IN THE TREATMENT of malignant melanoma, immune checkpoint inhibitors are no longer just for metastatic disease, and the best type may be agents targeting the programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1), according to results of CheckMate 238, presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO)...
FOR PATIENTS with locally advanced, resectable melanoma harboring BRAF mutations, adjuvant treatment with BRAF/ MEK inhibition significantly improves overall survival, results of the COMBI-AD trial have shown. The study was presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2017...
FORMAL DISCUSSANT of the ALEX and ALUR trials, Luis Paz-Ares, MD, Professor of Medicine at the Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre, Madrid, said that the ALEX trial is “good news” for patients. “Importantly, 40% had baseline metastases. Disease progression was nicely controlled with alectinib...
RESULTS OF TWO separate phase III trials confirm the activity of alectinib (Alecensa) in the central nervous system (CNS) in patients with anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK)-positive non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Results lend support for alectinib as the better first-line treatment option over...
DURING A DISCUSSION of Dr. Vale’s poster, Stéphane Oudard, MD, Professor of Oncology and Chief of the Oncology Clinical and Translational Research Unit at Georges Pompidou Hospital in Paris, France, said that although newer treatments have improved survival, there are still many challenges in...
FORMAL DISCUSSANT of the STAMPEDE trial, Cora Sternberg, MD, Chief of the Department of Medical Oncology, San Camillo Forlanini Hospital, Rome, commended the study design. “This multiarm, multistage design is very innovative. The investigators plan up to 10 trials over 20 years. The first results...
ABIRATERONE ACETATE (Zytiga) plus prednisone and docetaxel have moved up from the castrate-resistant metastatic setting to earlier in the course of disease as treatment of high-risk hormone-sensitive prostate cancer in men who are initiating androgen-deprivation therapy, based on level 1 evidence...
NEW RESEARCH examining patient-physician communication, yoga as supportive care, and psychosocial support for people with cancer will be featured at the 2017 Palliative and Supportive Care in Oncology Symposium on October 27–28, 2017, in San Diego. Featured sessions include randomized trials on...