“KRAS G12C inhibitors as monotherapy yield a relatively low overall response rate, but when you combine them with an EGFR [epidermal growth factor receptor] inhibitor, the response rate is nearly double,” said Federica Di Nicolantonio, MD, PhD, Professor of Oncology at the University of Turin in...
A 22-gene genomic classifier (the Decipher score) may be able to predict the course of disease in men with high-risk prostate cancer, according to a patient-level meta-analysis of three randomized clinical trials presented by Paul L. Nguyen, MD, at the 2021 American Society for Radiation Oncology...
The number of deaths related to breast cancer are increasing at an alarming pace worldwide. According to a World Health Organization (WHO) 2020 report, approximately 2,088,849 new cases and 627,000 deaths related to breast cancer occurred in 2018.1 More than 55% of these deaths occurred in low- to ...
The leading causes of mortality in the United States are cardiovascular disease (23%) and cancer (21%), accounting for more than 40% of total deaths reported.1,2 The increasing rise in health-care expenditures over the past several decades has driven the need for metrics to further evaluate the...
Study discussant Bruna Pellini, MD, of the Department of Thoracic Oncology, Moffitt Cancer Center, Florida, noted that, regardless of PD-L1 or tumor mutation burden status, the NADIM trial demonstrated improved progression-free and overall survival for patients with resectable, stage IIIA non–small ...
Pretreatment circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) levels in patients with non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) appear to be a more accurate predictor of long-term survival than classic survival surrogates, according to research presented during the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer...
The combination of dual checkpoint inhibition plus chemotherapy could be the new standard of care in first-line metastatic non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), according to data presented during the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) 2021 World Conference on Lung Cancer.1 ...
Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening recommendations made by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) in 2012 may have led to worse outcomes for insured patients with prostate cancer, according to data presented at the 2021 ASCO Quality Care Symposium.1 Findings from the retrospective...
The National Cancer Act of 1971 established a national priority to address the widely shared dread of a cancer diagnosis. The goal of the National Cancer Act was to strengthen the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to more effectively carry out the national effort against cancer. After the Act was...
In a report from the Children’s Oncology Group ARST0332 study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Venkatamani et al found that risk-based treatment of pediatric and young adult patients with synovial sarcoma produced favorable outcomes in those with nonmetastatic disease. Outcomes in...
Individuals diagnosed with cancer who live in low-income and rural areas may face an increased risk of suicide compared with patients living in high-income and urban areas, according to a study published by Suk et al in JAMA Network Open. The research focused on determining whether the risks and...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Heinz-Josef Lenz, MD, and colleagues, in the phase II CheckMate 142 trial, first-line treatment with nivolumab plus low-dose ipilimumab produced a high rate of durable responses in a cohort of patients who had received no prior treatment for...
In a prospective cohort study reported in The Lancet Oncology, Partha Basu, MD, and colleagues found that a single dose of quadrivalent human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine given to girls in India provided 10-year protection equal to two or three doses against persistent infection with HPV types 16...
Susana N. Banerjee, MBBS, PhD, of The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, discusses phase I results that have generated interest in the combination of the RAF/MEK inhibitor VS-6766 and the FAK inhibitor defactinib for patients with recurrent low-grade serous ovarian cancer, a disease that typically ...
Filippo Pietrantonio, MD, and Federica Morano, MD, both of the Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, discuss results from the MAYA trial, which provided proof of concept that temozolomide-induced hypermutation may be exploited to achieve durable responses to low-dose ipilimumab plus nivolumab in patients...
As reported in JAMA Surgery by van der Kruijssen et al, 60-day post–random assignment mortality results in the Danish/Dutch phase III CAIRO4 trial showed higher rates of mortality in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer who received primary tumor resection plus systemic treatment vs those...
In a global population-based study reported in The Lancet Oncology, Duggan et al identified national health system characteristics associated with reduced breast cancer mortality, including higher Universal Health Coverage Service Coverage Index (UHC Index) rating and increased number of public...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by William G. Wierda, MD, PhD, and colleagues, findings in the measurable residual disease (MRD) cohort of the phase II CAPTIVATE study indicated a high disease-free survival rate with placebo and no significant benefit of continued ibrutinib in...
In a single-center cohort study reported in JAMA Oncology, Barrio et al evaluated nodal recurrence rates in patients with clinically node-negative breast cancer following neoadjuvant chemotherapy for biopsy-proven node-positive disease. The investigators found an extremely low incidence of nodal...
A new report finds that more than 46,000 cancer cases annually in the United States could be prevented if Americans met the 5 hours per week of moderate-intensity activity recommended in the American Cancer Society’s physical activity guidelines. Recent findings published by Minihan et al in the...
World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, MD, honored the late Henrietta Lacks with a WHO Director-General’s award, recognizing her world-changing legacy. Ms. Lacks, a Black American woman, died of cervical cancer 70 years ago, on October 4, 1951. While she...
In a Dutch study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, de Ruiter et al found that white matter microstructure at baseline was associated with cognitive decline after chemotherapy for breast cancer. Study Details The study included 49 patients with breast cancer who received...
The first overall survival analysis of the WGS-ADAPT HER2+/HR– study, which evaluated neoadjuvant therapy in patients with hormone receptor–negative, HER2-positive disease, showed that treatment with pertuzumab and trastuzumab plus paclitaxel—or with the chemotherapy-free regimen of...
Invited discussant of the Short-HER trial, Evandro de Azambuja, MD, PhD, Head of the Medical Support Team at the Institut Jules Bordet, Brussels, acknowledged the good outcomes in low- and intermediate-risk patients treated with either a short or long duration of trastuzumab but said 1 year of the...
Long-term analysis of the Short-HER trial showed that 9 weeks of adjuvant trastuzumab conveyed benefits comparable to a 1-year course in patients with early HER2-positive breast cancer deemed to be at low or intermediate risk for recurrence. High-risk patients, however, derived considerably more...
C. Kent Osborne, MD, Founding Director of the Dan L. Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Dudley and Tina Sharp Chair for Cancer Research, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, said in a press briefing that the results of the study were clear, but the explanation for the findings is less so....
Adjuvant therapy with the PARP inhibitor olaparib for 1 year extended disease-free survival in patients with high-risk early-stage HER2-negative breast cancer with BRCA1/2 germline (inherited) mutations, according to a prespecified interim analysis of the phase III OlympiA trial presented at the...
Because of their well-established efficacy, inhibitors of cyclin-dependent kinases 4 and 6 (CDK4/6) are the standard of care in the treatment of hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer. The question now is this: After disease progresses on a CDK4/6 inhibitor and endocrine...
The addition of abiraterone acetate plus prednisone on top of androgen-deprivation therapy plus docetaxel improved survival in patients with de novo metastatic castration-sensitive prostate cancer vs androgen-deprivation therapy plus docetaxel alone. These results were from the phase III PEACE-1...
Care for the 15 most prevalent types of cancer in the United States cost approximately $156.2 billion for about 402,000 privately insured adult patients in 2018, according to a report published by Nicholas G. Zaorsky, MD, and colleagues in JAMA Network Open. The research team also found that...
In comments to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), ASCO expressed significant concerns that several provisions in the 2022 Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment System proposed rule have the potential to undermine access to cancer care for Medicare beneficiaries. ASCO does,...
In an analysis of long-term outcomes from the phase III NRG/RTOG 9804 trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Beryl McCormick, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and colleagues found that whole-breast irradiation vs observation was associated with a reduced risk of all and...
“The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is currently examining pembrolizumab for the adjuvant treatment of stage IIB and IIC melanoma; if approved, we would be introducing immunotherapy earlier in the patient journey,” commented invited discussant Omid Hamid, MD (@OmidHamidMD), who was an...
Monica Arnedos, MD, PhD, Head of the Breast Cancer Research Program at the Institut Bergonié, Bordeaux, France, commented on the study findings on extended treatment with letrozole. “We cannot ignore the results of the GIM4 trial.1 It provides additional strong evidence to support extended...
The resurging COVID-19 pandemic has reawakened challenges for patients and physicians—ones we all hoped were over—and presented stressful situations for patients and providers. Hospitals in some states, particularly those with lower vaccination rates, have faced levels of urgent illness that have...
Over the past month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued several regulatory decisions for novel treatments for patients with cancer. Priority Review for Relatlimab and Nivolumab Fixed-Dose Combination in Unresectable or Metastatic Melanoma The FDA accepted for Priority Review the...
Black patients with prostate cancer who were treated with the androgen receptor inhibitor darolutamide had clinical outcomes similar to those observed in the overall clinical trial population, according to results from the phase III ARAMIS trial presented by Neal Shore, MD, at the 14th AACR...
Ensuring equitable cancer care for every patient, everywhere has been embedded into ASCO’s mission statement since the Society’s inception nearly 60 years ago. Nevertheless, events of the past year, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has disproportionally impacted minority communities, ...
Invited study discussant, Johnie Rose, MD, PhD, called the correlation between Medicaid expansion and changes in 30-day mortality a critical research question. Dr. Rose is Assistant Professor in the Center for Community Health Integration at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and...
In a retrospective population-based study reported in JAMA Network Open, Deeb et al found that patients with metastatic cancer from racial and ethnic minority groups and those without private insurance were more likely to be admitted from the emergency department, receive invasive mechanical...
Maintenance durvalumab, the standard-of-care treatment for patients with unresectable stage III non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), remains significantly underutilized, according to data presented at the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) 2021 World Conference on Lung...
Several recent investigations have led to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of novel antiandrogens to treat nonmetastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. Yet, this work has not addressed the treatment of nonmetastatic hormone-sensitive biochemically recurrent prostate...
In an analysis reported in JAMA Network Open, Sharp et al identified the frequency of use of postprotocol PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors in control group patients receiving the tyrosine kinase inhibitor sunitinib in randomized trials comparing PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitor–containing combination therapy vs sunitinib ...
Some of the most impressive data on chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy have come from studies conducted in China. Attendees at the 2021 Pan Pacific Lymphoma Conference heard from one of the leading Chinese investigators, Peihua (Peggy) Lu, MD, of Lu Daopei Hospital, who described the...
In a study reported in JAMA Oncology, Alexander Melamed, MD, MPH, and colleagues found that improvements in median overall survival have been similar in patients from U.S. cancer programs that did vs did not increase their use of neoadjuvant chemotherapy for women with advanced ovarian cancer in...
A new study published by Jingxuan Zhao, MPH, and colleagues in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention found racial/ethnic disparities in survival among newly diagnosed patients with childhood cancers in the United States, and that area-level socioeconomic status and health insurance...
For more than 2 decades, the chemotherapy agent gemcitabine has been a mainstay treatment for several types of cancer. Now, scientists have uncovered genetic evidence of which patients with high-grade serous ovarian cancer are likely to benefit from the drug. In a study published by Panagiotis...
An international cross-sectional survey reported in The Lancet Oncology by Fundytus et al found that access to cancer medicines considered essential by oncologists is lacking across the spectrum of low- and lower middle–income to high-income countries. As stated by the investigators, “The World...
Manali I. Patel, MD, MPH, of Stanford University School of Medicine, discusses data suggesting that community health workers and innovative payer models can better engage low-income and minority patients with cancer, improve their health-related quality of life, and reduce unwanted and unnecessary...
Breast cancer survivors who participated in Active Living After Cancer, an evidence-based 12-week group program, markedly increased their physical activity and ability to accomplish the basic pursuits of daily life, reported Tami-Maury et al in the journal Cancer. The results show the program could ...