According to the World Health Organization (WHO), antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today. These highly resistant bacteria cause more than 750,000 deaths worldwide every year, a number that is predicted to rise dramatically....
With a population under half a million people, Brunei Darussalam is a small equatorial nation in Southeast Asia. Bordered by the South China Sea on the north, Brunei Darussalam is surrounded on all other sides by Malaysia, which separates the nation into two noncontiguous parts. Nearly two-thirds...
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. In this installment, Yen Nien Hou, PharmD, DipIOM, LAc, and Jyothirmai Gubili, MS, focus on...
In this installment of The ASCO Post’s Global Oncology series, Guest Editor Chandrakanth Are, MBBS, MBA, FRCS, FACS, spoke with Gregorio Jaimovich, MD, Director of the Bone Marrow Transplant Program at Favaloro University Hospital in Buenos Aires. Distinguished expert on radiation therapy and bone...
Katherine Van Loon, MD, MPH, was raised in Miami, until the age of 12, and then her family relocated to Atlanta, where she spent her junior and high school years. “If you ask my parents about my decision to become a doctor, they will say I first declared it at age 5. Nobody knew how that idea came...
During the opening session of the 2021 ASCO Annual Meeting, Julio Frenk, MD, PhD, MPH, President of the University of Miami, gave a riveting presentation in which he described the devastating effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic on patients with cancer as well as on fragile and fragmented...
A novel combination of well-known drugs may prolong survival in patients with prostate cancer, according to late-breaking research presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2021. The PEACE-1 and STAMPEDE studies found that the addition of abiraterone acetate plus...
Oncologists who treat patients with melanoma will need to become familiar with another immunotherapy approach. For refractory metastatic disease, adoptive cell therapy is on the horizon. “Adoptive cell therapy will offer additional hope for our patients with melanoma. We’ll likely be seeing this...
As ASCO Annual Meeting attendees know by now, clinicians don’t have to be at McCormick Place to hear practice-changing findings and forward-looking advances in the field of oncology. Interesting content was no exception at the 2021 conference, so in addition to covering the biggest news from the...
The integration of radiation therapy into chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy may improve outcomes for patients with relapsed or refractory lymphoma, according to Charles A. Enke, MD, Professor and the Bill Bures and Jerry Pabst Chair in Radiation Oncology at the Fred and Pamela Buffett...
Although the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has identified adolescents and young adults (AYAs) with cancer as a distinct patient population from children and older adults with the disease, research into the diagnosis, treatment, and survivorship specific to this patient population has not kept...
Invited discussant of the two studies, Elena Élez, MD, PhD, of the Colon Cancer Program, Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain, discussed the challenge of treating BRAF-mutant colorectal cancer and what the new data bring to that effort. Dr. Élez noted: “BRAF V600E–mutant metastatic ...
It has been well documented that a confluence of many factors, including low-socioeconomic status, contribute to health disparities and worse outcomes in minority patients with cancer. Strategies that partnered community-based health workers with low-income and minority patients with cancer...
In a study reported in JAMA Network Open, Fleming et al found that low skeletal muscle area and high visceral-to-total fat ratio were associated with increased expression of proinflammatory cytokines and VEGF as well as worse 5-year outcomes in patients with nonmetastatic colon cancer. Study...
Investigators from 22 institutions aimed to evaluate the impact of diabetes mellitus in a retrospective cohort of patients with advanced cancer treated with a single-agent immune checkpoint inhibitor. In a report presented by Cortellini et al at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO)...
Sentinel lymph node biopsy “had similar diagnostic accuracy and prognostic ability as lymphadenectomy in patients with high-grade endometrial cancer at greatest risk for nodal metastases,” according to the SENTOR trial, a prospective cohort study of 156 patients with clinical stage I disease. Using ...
In the 5-year follow-up of the pivotal SOLO-1 trial in women with newly diagnosed advanced ovarian cancer and a BRCA1/2 mutation, maintenance treatment with olaparib led to a more than doubling in progression-free survival, according to a presentation at the Society of Gynecologic Oncology (SGO)...
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...
In addition to covering the biggest news from the meeting in other articles, The ASCO Post brings you these brief news summaries of notable abstracts in multiple myeloma, lymphoma, and leukemia. Maintenance Daratumumab in Multiple Myeloma Part 2 of the CASSIOPEIA trial in 866 patients with newly...
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...
Invited discussant of of the C-144-01 study,1 Jason J. Luke, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine and Director of the Cancer Immunotherapeutics Center, University of Pittsburgh Hillman Cancer Center, Pittsburgh, noted that lifileucel is “clearly an active regimen in the post–PD-1/CTLA-4 setting and...
Invited discussant of the VISION trial, Mary-Ellen Taplin, MD, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, commented on the study, noting that she was a co-investigator of the trial. “Patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer have a number of treatment options. There are 10...
Lutetium-177–PSMA-617 (LuPSMA)—an investigational radiolabeled small molecule—significantly improved radiographic progression-free survival and overall survival when added to the standard of care compared with the standard of care alone for men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer...
As first-line treatment of advanced esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, nivolumab-containing regimens improved overall survival over standard-of-care chemotherapy, according to the first results of the global phase III CheckMate 648 trial presented at the 2021 ASCO Annual Meeting by Ian Chau, MD,...
On September 15, zanubrutinib (Brukinsa), a small-molecule inhibitor of Bruton’s tyrosine kinase (BTK), received accelerated approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of adult patients with relapsed or refractory marginal zone lymphoma who have received at least...
In an Italian single-center study reported in a letter in The Lancet Oncology, Scoccianti et al found that patients who underwent radiotherapy for cancer within the 6 months prior to receipt of the Moderna mRNA-1273 COVID-19 vaccine did not experience a difference in adverse reactions to the...
Maintenance durvalumab—the recommended maintenance treatment for patients with unresectable stage III non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) following chemoradiation—remains significantly underutilized, according to research presented by Liu et al at the International Association for the Study of Lung...
This week, we’re hearing about three abstracts presented during the IASLC 2021 World Conference on Lung Cancer, focusing on clinical trial enrollment during the COVID-19 pandemic, air pollution's role in lung cancer risk, and strategies for reducing barriers and improving cancer care in...
In a validation study with data presented at the American Urological Association’s 2021 Annual Meeting, clinician-researchers reported that a new test (miR Sentinel PCC4 Test) may be able to detect and risk-classify prostate cancer at the molecular level with predictive accuracy based on a single...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Chi et al1—and summarized in this issue of The ASCO Post—the prespecified final overall survival analysis of the phase III TITAN trial1-3 has confirmed a clear overall survival and radiographic progression-free survival benefit with the combination ...
The treatment paradigm for multiple myeloma continues to evolve at a rapid pace with the introduction of new drugs and the development of drug combinations, particularly the initial approach to the treatment of newly diagnosed multiple myeloma.1 One major shift in the treatment of newly diagnosed...
Based on the findings of the phase III VISION trial, reported by Sartor et al1 and summarized in this issue of The ASCO Post, lutetium-177–PSMA-617 (LuPSMA) is the first of the prostate-specific membrane antigen–targeted cancer theranostics to demonstrate a survival-prolonging benefit for men with...
Until I was diagnosed with HER2-positive, estrogen receptor–positive/progesterone receptor–positive de novo metastatic breast cancer in 2009, I didn’t realize that Black women could get the disease. Although my mother died of metastatic breast cancer 5 years earlier when she was 65, she was the...
A study investigating the association between state Medicaid income eligibility limits and long-term survival among newly diagnosed patients with cancer has found that patients living in states with lower Medicaid income eligibility limits had worse long-term survival compared with patients living ...
Patients who had advanced gastroesophageal cancer but were considered unsuitable for full-dose chemotherapy because of their advanced age and/or frailty “had an improved patient experience with no significant detriment in cancer control” when treated with reduced-intensity chemotherapy in the phase ...
About 14,500 new cases of invasive cervical cancer are diagnosed each year in the United States and nearly 4,300 women die from the disease. Studies show that those living in higher-poverty areas experience higher rates of morbidity and mortality from many preventable cancers, including cervical...
Guest Editor’s Note: Despite the high prevalence of cancer-related fatigue, there are few effective management strategies for this debilitating condition. Music therapy is a nonpharmacologic modality that has been shown to reduce anxiety in oncology settings. In this installment of The ASCO Post’s...
In the phase II PEMDAC study, researchers showed that the combination of the PD-1 inhibitor pembrolizumab and the histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitor entinostat resulted in durable responses in a small group of patients with metastatic uveal melanoma. These findings were published by Ny et al in...
In a Global Registry of COVID-19 in Childhood Cancer cohort study reported in The Lancet Oncology, Mukkada et al found that approximately one-fifth of children with cancer infected with COVID-19 worldwide had severe illness, with an associated mortality rate exceeding that reported in the general...
Long-term cardiac safety and efficacy have been confirmed for pertuzumab plus trastuzumab in patients with early breast cancer, in an update of the phase II BERENICE trial reported at the 2021 ESMO Breast Cancer Virtual Congress.1 Chau T. Dang, MD, of the Breast Medicine Service at Memorial Sloan...
In a study reported in The Lancet Oncology, Ward et al estimated the improvements in global overall survival for female breast cancer that could be achieved via increased availability of treatment and imaging modalities, as well as improvements in quality of care. Study Details The study used a...
Advances in molecular imaging are having a big impact on prostate cancer management and outcomes, according to Ashesh B. Jani, MD, the James C. Kennedy Professor in Prostate Cancer, Department of Radiation Oncology at the Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, Atlanta. Dr. Jani described his ...
In a letter to the editor published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Bagchi et al describe the course of treatment in a 3-year-old child with an intracranial tumor and his response to therapy with the kinase inhibitor lorlatinib. Key Points Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the head in a...
The measurement of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) is changing the way gastrointestinal cancers are managed, according to Bassel F. El-Rayes, MD, Professor and Vice Chair for Clinical Research in the Department of Hematology and Oncology, Emory University, and Associate Cancer Center Director,...
A new study found that during the COVID-19 pandemic, breast cancer screening rates declined among women aged 50 to 74 years at 32 community health centers that serve lower-income populations in the United States. The report, published by Stacey A. Fedewa, PhD, and colleagues in the journal Cancer,...
In a Swedish prostate cancer screening trial (STHLM3-MRI) reported in The Lancet Oncology, Nordström et al found that use of the Stockholm3 screening test together with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-guided biopsy reduced overdetection of disease while preserving the ability to detect clinically...
Commonly used blood pressure drugs may improve survival for patients with colorectal cancer, a recent study published by Balkrishnan et al in Cancer Medicine suggests. After reviewing outcomes of almost 14,000 patients with colorectal cancer, researchers determined that angiotensin-converting...
A new study found that incidence rates for malignant brain and other central nervous system (CNS) tumors declined by 0.8% annually during 2008 through 2017 in the United States for all ages combined. The decline was driven by trends in adults, whereas rates have slightly increased by 0.5% to 0.7%...
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, and colleagues found that whole-breast irradiation vs observation was associated with reduced risk of all and invasive ipsilateral breast recurrence at 15...
Even before my breast cancer diagnosis in early 2002, the year was shaping up to be life-altering for me and my family. We had moved from Seattle to Houston for a new career opportunity for my husband and were just settling into our new home when I felt a pea-sized nodule in my left breast during a ...