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Showing 20201 - 20250Acupuncture May Reduce Arm Lymphedema in Patients with Breast Cancer
Integrative Oncology is guest edited by Barrie R. Cassileth, MS, PhD, Chief of the Integrative Medicine Service and Laurance S. Rockefeller Chair in Integrative Medicine at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York. The Integrative Medicine Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center...
David Penson, MD, MPH, Receives $2 Million Research Award to Study Prostate Cancer
David Penson, MD, MPH, Professor of Urologic Surgery, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, has received a $2 million research award from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to study localized prostate cancer. Dr. Penson is also Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Surgical ...
Professional Societies Endorse 2015 Standard for Cancer Center Accreditation by Commission on Cancer
In 2015, the American College of Surgeons (ACoS) Commission on Cancer (CoC) will require cancer centers to implement screening programs for psychosocial distress as a new criterion for accreditation. The American Psychosocial Oncology Society (APOS) recently announced recommendations to support a...
Adolescents, Young Adults with Cancer Often Challenged By Unmet Needs Following Treatment
About 70,000 adolescents and young adults (AYAs) between the ages of 15 and 39 are diagnosed with cancer each year, and in the past 30 years, there has been little or no improvement in survival in this population. In addition to the disease itself, they face many other challenges: reentry into...
The Sunshine Act Calls for Greater Transparency in Industry-Doctor Relationships
Signed into law on March 23, 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act represents the most significant overhaul of the U.S. health-care system since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. Because of the law’s sheer scope, parts of it still remain obfuscated by its 2,400 or so...
Focus on the West Virginia Oncology Society
Now in its fifth year, the West Virginia Oncology Society (WVOS) is already having a major impact on cancer care in the state. In 2010, a joint initiative to develop a statewide cancer clinical trials network was launched by WVOS and the West Virginia University Cancer Center. With funding support...
Intercalated Chemotherapy/Erlotinib Improves Progression-free Survival in Advanced NSCLC
EGFR mutation status may not be known at the time treatment is started in patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Further, some data suggest that the efficacy of concurrent treatment with an EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor and chemotherapy is reduced because the G1 cell-cycle...
Docetaxel Superior to Erlotinib in Second-line Treatment of Advanced Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer with Wild-type EGFR
There is ongoing debate about the efficacy of erlotinib (Tarceva) in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) whose tumors have wild-type EGFR. In the TAILOR trial, reported in Lancet Oncology by Garassino and colleagues,1 erlotinib was compared with standard docetaxel as...
First-line Carboplatin/Pemetrexed Improves Survival vs Pemetrexed Alone in Advanced Lung Cancer
A significant proportion of patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) have poor performance status, and optimal clinical management of these patients has not been established. In an attempt to help define optimal chemotherapy in such patients, Mauro Zukin, MD, of Instituto Nacional...
30 Years of Identifying High-Quality Research with Breakthrough Potential
Today, cancer research happens on many compelling fronts. At the Conquer Cancer Foundation, our focus is on clinical and translational research—that is, prudently and swiftly translating research findings to enhance the care of patients with cancer in hospitals, clinics, physicians’ offices, and...
Policy Update Aims to Advance Tobacco Cessation and Control Worldwide
In response to scientific advances and the evolving regulatory and policy environment, ASCO recently released an update to its 2003 policy statement on tobacco cessation and control. The statement reviews advancements that have been made since 2003 and outlines a refined set of recommendations...
ASCO's Guideline on Drugs to Lower Breast Cancer Risk
Direct your patients to www.cancer.net/whattoknow so they can learn about ASCO’s recent guideline on drugs to risk of breast cancer for women who have a high risk of developing the disease, including what the recommendations mean for patients and a list of questions to ask the doctor. In addition,...
Conquer Cancer Foundation Grant Recipient 'Pays It Forward' Through Philanthropic Support, Volunteer Service
Dr. Dawn Hershman, Associate Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Columbia University Medical Center and leader of the Breast Cancer Program at Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, is committed to doing what she can to develop, encourage, and support the next generation of oncology...
A Look Ahead: The Next Decade in Pediatric Oncology
The past 10 years have seen dramatic advances in cancer care, especially in better screening methods and earlier detection, genomic sequencing, and more effective therapies, which have led to increased survival rates in both childhood and adult cancers. According to the National Cancer Institute...
Infertility in Men Raises Their Risk for Cancer
A cohort study of 2,238 men who were evaluated for infertility at a clinic in Texas from 1989 to 2009 found that those men who had azoospermia, a condition in which no measurable sperm is present, had a 2.2-fold higher cancer risk compared with those who were nonazoospermic. The study was published ...
American Association for Cancer Research Foundation Appoints New Executive Director
The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) recently announced the appointment of Mitchell R. Stoller as Executive Director of the AACR Foundation for the Prevention and Cure of Cancer. In his role, Mr. Stoller will lead strategy and work closely with the AACR Foundation Board of Trustees...
SIDEBAR: Program Background
Partners for Cancer Care and Prevention holds that early detection and high-quality treatment of breast and cervical cancer save lives. The organization exists to build community capacity for the creation of high-quality, holistic breast and cervical health programs managed by the local health...
Program Aims to Overcome Barriers to Early Cancer Care in Colombia
According to a report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s GLOBOCAN project, one woman dies every minute from breast cancer and one woman dies every 2 minutes from cervical cancer.1 The majority of these deaths occur in developing countries, where access to health care is limited ...
Whole-exome Sequencing of NCI-60 Cell Line Panel Provides Genomic Resource for Cancer Biology and Pharmacology
The NCI-60 cell lines, which represent cancers of the lung, colon, brain, ovary, breast, prostate, and kidney, as well as leukemia and melanoma, are the most frequently studied human tumor cell lines in cancer research and have generated the most extensive cancer pharmacology database worldwide. As ...
AACR Cautions Diminished NIH Funding Jeopardizes Ability to Eradicate Cancer Health Disparities
Recently the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) hosted a congressional briefing to highlight the significance of federally funded biomedical research in improving our understanding of cancer health disparities and developing targeted interventions to eliminate them. Disproportionate...
Is Age Truly Relative in HER2-Positive Breast Cancer?
Breast cancer arising in younger women has increasingly become the subject of intense study, and often debate, over the past decade. Retrospective studies have illustrated that breast cancer in young women is more commonly an aggressive subtype (ie, triple-negative/basal-like, HER2-enriched),...
Age Not Linked to Recurrence in Observation or Trastuzumab Groups with HER2-positive Breast Cancer
Available data suggest that younger age is an independent risk factor for disease recurrence and death in women with breast cancer. However, there has not been adequate study of the interaction of age with human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) status or anti-HER2 treatment. In an analysis ...
Further Support for Front-line Targeted EGFR Therapy
LUX-Lung 3 is the sixth, and largest, prospective, randomized trial to evaluate targeted EGFR inhibition vs front-line platinum doublet chemotherapy for patients with EGFR mutations. LUX-Lung 3 distinguishes itself from the previous trials (see Table 1) by using afatinib (Gilotrif), a...
LUX-Lung 3: Afatinib Prolongs Progression-free Survival vs Cisplatin/Pemetrexed in Advanced Lung Adenocarcinoma
Afatinib (Gilotrif) is an oral selective ErbB family inhibitor that irreversibly blocks signaling from EGFR/ErbB1, HER2/ErbB2, and ErbB4 and has exhibited broad-spectrum activity against EGFR mutations in preclinical studies. A phase II study of afatinib in EGFR-mutation positive lung...
New Campaign Addresses Rise in Young-onset Colon Cancer
The Colon Cancer Alliance has partnered with Bowel Cancer UK and the Colon Cancer Prevention Project to launch the international Never Too Young awareness campaign, addressing the rise in young-onset (younger than 50 years) colon cancer diagnoses and mortality rates. This global collaboration comes ...
ASCO Studies Support Limited Use of 'Routine' Imaging
The overuse of imaging in oncology workup and surveillance is a timely concern, as health-care dollars shrink and the risk for second malignancies becomes clearer. At this year’s ASCO Annual Meeting, several studies showed that although many routine imaging studies may be unnecessary, physicians...
Targeted Suppression of a Reactivated Developmental Pathway in Hepatocellular Cancer
This issue of The ASCO Post summarizes the results of an important study recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine by Yong and colleagues. As outlined, investigators from the National University of Singapore Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine have identified re-expression of SALL4 as a ...
Oncofetal Protein SALL4 Is a Marker of Aggressive Hepatocellular Carcinoma and a Potential Therapeutic Target
Hepatocellular carcinomas with characteristics of embryonic stem cell and progenitor cell gene expression are associated with particularly poor prognosis. SALL4 is an oncofetal protein that is expressed in the human fetal liver and normally silenced in the adult liver, but re-expressed in a...
Diane E. Meier, MD: From Early Lessons in Critical Thinking to 'Palliative Care Everywhere'
Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. —Helen Keller, Optimism, 1903 Shortly past 8:00 AM on July 1977, Diane E. Meier, MD, FACP, began the first day of her medical internship. Within minutes she would experience another first: the death of a patient...
Evolving Issues in Low-dose CT Lung Cancer Screening
Over a decade has passed since the start of the National Lung Cancer Screening Trial and more than 2 years since the first report indicating that this randomized study had demonstrated a significant reduction in lung cancer mortality with low-dose computed tomography (CT) screening.1 That favorable ...
Where Are We With ALK Inhibition in Lung Cancer?
The prospective phase III PROFILE 1007 study compared the ALK inhibitor crizotinib (Xalkori) to chemotherapy in patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with ALK gene–rearranged tumors refractory to previous chemotherapy. The study showed a clear superiority for crizotinib in terms ...
Crizotinib Improves Progression-free Survival vs Pemetrexed or Docetaxel in Advanced ALK-positive NSCLC
In a phase III trial reported by Alice T. Shaw, MD, PhD, a thoracic oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, and colleagues in The New England Journal of Medicine, crizotinib (Xalkori) improved progression-free survival compared with standard chemotherapy in previously treated patients ...
PET/CT Superior to Bone Marrow Biopsy for Diagnosis, Prognosis in Lymphoma
A more precise method for determining bone marrow involvement in patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma has been identified by researchers in a study published recently in The Journal of Nuclear Medicine.1 Imaging with 18F–fluorodeoxyglucose positron-emission tomography/computed tomography...
Ibrutinib Produces High Response Rate in Patients with Refractory Mantle Cell Lymphoma
Ibrutinib is a first-in-class oral covalent inhibitor of Bruton’s tyrosine kinase, a mediator of the B cell-receptor signaling pathway implicated in the pathogenesis of B-cell cancers. As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Michael L. Wang, MD, of The University of Texas MD Anderson...
FDA Invites Public Input on Menthol in Cigarettes
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) seeking additional information to help the agency make informed decisions about menthol in cigarettes. Despite decades of work to reduce tobacco use in the United States, it continues to be the...
Expert Point of View: Ranjana Advani, MD
At the 2013 ASCO Annual Meeting, Ranjana Advani, MD, the Saul A. Rosenberg, MD, Professor of Lymphoma at Stanford University Medical Center, Palo Alto, California, discussed the promise of the B-cell signaling inhibitors idelalisib and ibrutinib in lymphoma. Biggest Question Given the...
B-cell Receptor Signaling Inhibitors Moving Forward in Lymphoma
Though still in early-phase studies, novel B-cell receptor signaling inhibitors look very promising for the treatment of lymphoma, according to reports from the 2013 ASCO Annual Meeting. Idelalisib in Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma In non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), idelalisib looked impressive as both a single...
Tecemotide Vaccine Warrants Further Study in Unresectable Stage III Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer
Results of the START trial suggest that maintenance therapy with the investigational immunotherapy tecemotide (formerly known as L-BLP25) may have a role in the treatment of patients with unresectable stage III non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Although there was no significant overall survival...
Acquired Resistance to Crizotinib from ROS1 G2032R Mutation
The ALK inhibitor crizotinib (Xalkori) has also shown activity in lung cancers with ROS1 translocations. As recently reported by Mark M. Awad, MD, PhD, of Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, and colleagues in The New England Journal of Medicine, a mutation conferring resistance to crizotinib...
SIDEBAR: ‘Major Milestone in War on Cancer’
The recommendation by the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) for the use of low-dose, computed tomography (CT) to detect early lung cancer in high-risk individuals is a major milestone in the war on cancer. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death across the world. Despite...
U.S. Preventive Services Task Force Recommends CT Screening for Lung Cancer in High-risk Individuals
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recently posted its final evidence report and draft recommendation statement on screening for lung cancer. The Task Force is providing an opportunity for public comment on this draft recommendation statement until August 26. All public comments will be...
Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy and Interval Debulking May Be Appropriate for Some Patients With Poor Performance Status Advanced Ovarian Cancer
Patients with newly diagnosed advanced ovarian cancer—especially patients with poor performance status—appear to derive benefits from neoadjuvant chemotherapy followed by surgery vs primary surgery followed by chemotherapy, according to results of the Medical Research Council (MRC) CHORUS trial. In ...
Expert Point of View: Jonathan S. Berek, MD
Weekly vs every-3-week therapy is a somewhat controversial area in ovarian cancer, said formal discussant of the MITO-7 trial, Jonathan S. Berek, MD, Director of the Stanford Women’s Cancer Center, Palo Alto, California. “[Japan Clinical Oncology Group (JCOG)]-16 showed a survival advantage for...
Weekly Carboplatin/Paclitaxel Improves Quality of Life, Toxicity vs Every-3-week Regimen in Advanced Ovarian Cancer
Patients with advanced ovarian cancer have similar survival outcomes thus far with a weekly regimen of carboplatin/paclitaxel vs the standard every-3-week regimen, but the weekly regimen is much better tolerated with improved quality of life, according to final results of the Multicenter Italian...
Expert Point of View: Judy Garber, MD, MPH
Judy Garber, MD, MPH, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Cancer Risk and Prevention Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, was the formal discussant of the GeparSixto paper. The rationale for studying platinum in triple-negative breast cancer is clear: The...
GeparSixto Study Finds Benefit for Neoadjuvant Carboplatin in Triple-negative Breast Cancer
In patients with triple-negative breast cancer, the addition of carboplatin significantly improved the rate of pathologic complete response after neoadjuvant chemotherapy in a study by the German Breast Group (GBG)/Gynecologic Oncology Working Group–Breast (AGO-B) reported at the 2013 ASCO Annual...
Molecular Tests and Precision Medicine: Not So Fast Now!
The era of the application of genomic, proteomic, and a host of other “omic” analyses to guide decision-making in the therapeutic selection of drugs and biologics is now a key part of cancer care. Medical practice is working to keep up with the scientific advances, evaluate them, and add a variety...
Oncologists Speak Out Against the High Cost of Cancer Drugs
That the United States spends twice as much on health care than other industrialized countries—about $2.8 trillion in 2012—without reaping appreciably better outcomes1 is not news. The topic has been dissected on the front pages of leading newspapers for years and was the subject of the entire...
Expert Point of View: Tim Maughan, MD
Maintenance treatment with capecitabine plus bevacizumab can be considered in clinical practice, according to Tim Maughan, MD, Professor of Clinical Oncology at Oxford University in the United Kingdom, who discussed CAIRO3 at the session. He said that approximately 60% of patients with metastatic...
Maintenance Treatment Delays Progression in Metastatic Colorectal Cancer
For patients with unresectable metastatic colorectal cancer, maintenance treatment with capecitabine (Xeloda) and bevacizumab (Avastin) significantly delayed disease progression and improved overall survival in the phase III CAIRO3 study by the Dutch Colorectal Cancer Group. Miriam Koopman, MD,...
