The ASCO Post’s Integrative Oncology series is intended to facilitate the availability of evidence-based information on integrative and complementary therapies sometimes used by patients with cancer. Shelly Latte-Naor, MD, and Jyothirmai Gubili, MS, explore some of the beneficial effects attributed ...
ON NOVEMBER 16, 2018, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) expanded the approved use of brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris) injection in combination with chemotherapy for adult patients with certain types of peripheral T-cell lymphoma (PTCL)—adults with previously untreated systemic anaplastic...
ON NOVEMBER 6, 2018, following Priority Review, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved elotuzumab (Empliciti) injection for intravenous use in combination with pomalidomide (Pomalyst) and dexamethasone for the treatment of adult patients with multiple myeloma who have received at...
The ASCO Nominating Committee has selected 15 distinguished ASCO members as candidates for open leadership positions within the Society, including: The office of President-Elect Three seats on the Society’s Board of Directors Three seats on the Nominating Committee Biographical information and...
The phase III DUO trial, reported by Flinn et al and reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post, has led to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of a novel B-cell receptor (BCR) kinase inhibitor, duvelisib (Copiktra), which targets phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K)-δ/γ in patients...
In a 2-year follow-up of the phase III SUPREMO trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Galina Velikova, PhD, of the Leeds Cancer Centre, St. James’s University Hospital, United Kingdom, and colleagues found worse chest wall symptoms in women with intermediate-risk breast cancer who did vs did not...
Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) expanded the approved use of brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris) injection in combination with chemotherapy for adult patients with certain types of peripheral T-cell lymphoma (PTCL)—adults with previously untreated systemic anaplastic large cell...
Elderly patients with limited-stage small cell lung cancer (SCLC) showed similar survival and toxicity compared to younger patients when treated with concurrent chemoradiotherapy. These study findings were published by Christodoulou et al in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology. SCLC constitutes ...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Shaitelman et al, 3-year outcomes of a phase III noninferiority trial indicate that hypofractionated whole-breast irradiation (HF-WBI) followed by a tumor bed boost is not inferior to conventionally fractionated whole-breast irradiation (CF-WBI)...
A study of 112 patients with metastatic solid tumors found that the use of an artificial intelligence (AI)-based smartphone app reduced both the severity of patients’ reported pain and hospital admissions. After an 8-week period, patients who used the AI-powered app to monitor and address...
The ASCO Post is pleased to present Hematology Expert Review, an ongoing feature that quizzes readers on issues in hematology. In this installment, Drs. Abutalib and Medeiros explore the recently updated World Health Organization (WHO) classification of hematopoietic and lymphoid tissue...
FIRST-LINE TREATMENT options for advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) include single- agent immunotherapy for patients with a programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) tumor proportion score of at least 50% or in combination with chemotherapy in unselected patients.1-3 Single immunotherapy is...
ACCORDING TO a study by Johns Hopkins, medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States.1 Lakshmi Santanam, PhD, tackled such sobering data at the 2018 ASCO Quality Care Symposium. “Incident learning systems are not just about medical errors or data; it’s kind of a first...
Patients with metastatic non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) receiving treatment at academic centers have an increased 2-year survival compared to patients treated at community-based centers, according to findings published by Ramalingam et al in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology. An...
On November 6, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved elotuzumab (Empliciti) injection for intravenous use in combination with pomalidomide (Pomalyst) and dexamethasone for the treatment of adult patients with multiple myeloma who have received at least two prior therapies,...
A health-care system is evaluated by various metrics: one is how it cares for its most vulnerable patients. The United States spends far more on health care than any nation in the world, yet access to high-quality oncology services remains elusive to certain minority populations—none more so than...
Persephone is a 4,088-patient trial that Helena Margaret Earl, MBBS, PhD, reported at the 2018 ASCO Annual Meeting as establishing that 6 months of trastuzumab (Herceptin) is not inferior to 12 months in 4-year survival without invasive or local regional recurrence or distant metastases. Dr. Earl...
The Persephone presentation by Helena Margaret Earl, MBBS, PhD, got a lot of publicity after a pre–ASCO Annual Meeting press release, suggesting that 6 months of adjuvant trastuzumab (Herceptin) is enough. The advice of experts has been that the evidence is inconclusive, but I have not heard a...
A prognostic model developed using a machine learning approach may be able to identify African American patients with breast cancer who have an increased risk of death, according to results of a study presented by Bhattarai et al at the 11th AACR Conference on The Science of Cancer Health...
Neoadjuvant erlotinib (Tarceva) benefits selected patients with epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR)-mutated non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who undergo complete resection of stage IIIA-N2 disease, according to a randomized study comparing erlotinib with gemcitabine plus cisplatin as...
On October 30, 2018, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved pembrolizumab (Keytruda) in combination with carboplatin and either paclitaxel or nanoparticle albumin-bound (nab)-paclitaxel (Abraxane) as first-line treatment of metastatic squamous non–small cell lung...
Adjuvant treatment with zoledronic acid, plus hormonal therapy with the aromatase inhibitor letrozole, significantly increases disease-free survival compared to tamoxifen in premenopausal women with hormone receptor–positive early breast cancer, according to results reported by Perrone et al...
The first report of a large international clinical trial shows that, for men who show signs of prostate cancer after surgical removal of their prostates, extending radiation therapy to the pelvic lymph nodes combined with adding short-term androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT) to standard treatment...
Treatment of renal cell carcinoma with stereotactic radiation therapy is as safe and effective for patients with one kidney as it is for those with two, according to an analysis of an international data set presented by Correa et al at the 60th Annual Meeting of the American Society for...
In the first randomized, phase II clinical trial of its kind, researchers have shown that an aggressive form of high-precision radiation therapy can increase survival in patients with oligometastatic tumors. These findings were presented by Palma et al in the plenary session at the 60th Annual ...
Adding radiation therapy or surgery to systemic therapy for patients with stage IV lung cancer whose cancer has spread to a limited number of sites can significantly extend overall survival, according to new results from a multicenter, randomized, controlled phase II study. The findings were...
A subset of patients with low-risk breast cancer is highly unlikely to see cancer return following breast conservation surgery, but can lower that risk even further with radiation therapy, finds a new long-term clinical trial report. These 12-year follow-up data from the only prospective,...
In a 10-year study of women who received radiation therapy to treat early-stage breast cancer, those receiving fewer, larger individual radiation doses experienced similarly low rates of late-onset side effects as those undergoing conventional radiation therapy. Findings from the...
A new analysis of genetic data from a large prospective registry and clinical data from several randomized trials indicates that African American patients may have comparatively higher cure rates when treated with radiation therapy than Caucasian patients. The study, which is the first report...
Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) improved survival in patients with head and neck cancer that has recurred or metastasized in the KEYNOTE-048 trial, according to late-breaking results from the study reported by Burtness et al at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2018 Congress (Abstract...
Patients with human papillomavirus (HPV)-positive throat cancer responded better to chemoradiotherapy than to cetuximab (Erbitux) with radiotherapy, according to late-breaking research reported by Mehanna et al at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2018 Congress (Abstract LBA9_PR)....
A combination of the immune checkpoint blocker avelumab (Bavencio) plus the tyrosine kinase inhibitor axitinib (Inlyta) improved progression-free survival (PFS) in previously untreated patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma (RCC) in the phase III JAVELIN Renal 101 study, according to results...
Two-year maintenance therapy with olaparib (Lynparza), a poly ADP-ribose polymerase (PARP) inhibitor, led to a substantial improvement in progression-free survival (PFS) in newly diagnosed patients with advanced ovarian cancer and a BRCA1/2 mutation, results from the phase III SOLO-1 trial...
Arul Chinnaiyan, MD, PhD, of the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center, has received an Outstanding Investigator Award from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) that provides $6.5 million in funding over 7 years. The grant will fund research to create new bioinformatics resources and identify...
As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine by Ghassan K. Abou-Alfa, MD, and colleagues, and reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post, the phase III CELESTIAL trial has demonstrated that cabozantinib (Cabometyx) improved the median overall survival to 10.2 months in comparison to 8 months...
“Patients with follicular lymphoma who relapse early after treatment are a minority of patients, fortunately, but they are clearly patients with a different disease,” according to Jonathon B. Cohen, MD, of Emory University School of Medicine. At Emory’s 2018 Debates and Didactics in Hematology and...
Targeting a common mutation in patients with hormone receptor (HR)–positive, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-negative advanced breast cancer with the alpha-specific phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase (PI3K) inhibitor alpelisib improved progression-free survival, according to...
Treatment with the cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) 4/6 inhibitor palbociclib (Ibrance) achieved a clinically meaningful improvement in overall survival in patients with hormone receptor (HR)-positive, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-negative advanced breast cancer that has relapsed or ...
A combination of immunotherapy and chemotherapy improves survival in some patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer, according to late-breaking results from the IMpassion130 trial reported by Schmid et al at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2018 Congress (Abstract...
A phase III trial presented by Jiang et al at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2018 Congress showed activity of histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitor therapy in advanced hormone receptor–positive breast cancer (Abstract 283O_PR). Endocrine therapies are the foundation of...
The addition of pembrolizumab (Keytruda) to a standard platinum doublet as first-line therapy improved overall and progression-free survival in patients with metastatic squamous non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), in the primary analysis of KEYNOTE-407.1,2 Furthermore, it did not seem to matter...
Even before James P. Allison, PhD, made an appearance at the Fourth International Cancer Immunotherapy Conference: Translating Science Into Survival in New York City, the excitement among attendees was palpable. Earlier that day, October 1, 2018, Dr. Allison and Tasuku Honjo, MD, PhD, of Kyoto...
In a study reported in the Journal of Oncology Practice, Mrad et al found an increase in the proportion of patients with stage IV lung cancer admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) during terminal hospitalization between 1998 and 2014. A large increase in palliative care contacts also occurred,...
On October 16, 2018, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved talazoparib (Talzenna), a poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitor, for patients with deleterious or suspected deleterious germline BRCA-mutated (gBRCAm), HER2-negative locally advanced or metastatic breast cancer....
ON SEPTEMBER 27, 2018, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved dacomitinib tablets (Vizimpro) for the first-line treatment of patients with metastatic non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) exon 19 deletion or exon 21 L858R substitution...
The phase III ECHELON-2 clinical trial has met its primary endpoint, demonstrating a statistically significant improvement in progression-free survival (PFS) with brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris) in combination with CHP (cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, prednisone) vs CHOP (cyclophosphamide,...
Advances in the treatment of multiple myeloma have led to longer progression-free survival, but the majority of patients will still relapse despite newer treatments. A number of new drugs and combinations are under study in the hope of improving outcomes. “Multiple myeloma is a complex disease...
Germline mutations in the breast cancer–susceptibility genes 1 and 2 (BRCA1/2) increase the risk for cancer due to an inability to repair DNA double-strand breaks, and about 5% of patients with unselected breast cancer carry a germline BRCA mutation.1 These DNA repair–deficient tumors are...
Lauren P. Wallner, PhD, MPH, of the University of Michigan, discusses her findings from a population-based study, which showed that many patients believe they had no choice about whether or not to receive radioactive iodine, even though it often does not improve survival. There is a need, she says, ...
The C-C chemokine receptor 4 (CCR4) is predominantly expressed in type 2 helper T (Th2) cells and regulatory T (Treg) cells.1 Under physiologic conditions and in response to its ligands, CCL17 (TARC) and CCL22 (MDC), CCR4 promotes T-cell migration to the skin.2 Of note, CCR4 is highly expressed in...