Checkpoint inhibitors have revolutionized the treatment of advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), but evidence of their benefit was restricted to the second-line setting. However, early-phase trials with both pembrolizumab (Keytruda) and nivolumab (Opdivo) demonstrated favorable results in...
An international team of researchers from the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital–Washington University Pediatric Cancer Genome Project has completed a detailed map of the genomic landscape for core-binding factor acute myeloid leukemia (CBF-AML). The work reveals differences in the...
The recall rate of screening mammography is reduced when radiologists compare with more than one prior mammogram, according to a recent study by Hayward et al in American Journal of Roentgenology. “Our findings suggest that radiologists who make comparisons with more than one prior...
Scientists have measured the genetic damage caused by smoking in different organs of the body and identified several different mechanisms by which tobacco smoking causes mutations in DNA. Researchers at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and their collaborators ...
The release of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) 14th Report on Carcinogens on November 3, 2016, included 7 newly reviewed substances, bringing the cumulative total to 248 listings. The chemical trichloroethylene (TCE), the metallic element cobalt, and cobalt compounds...
As many as 60% of patients with cancer report distress following a cancer diagnosis, and this stress can have a significant impact on patients’ well-being, resulting in psychosocial problems, physical side effects, and dissatisfaction with their health care. To examine the impact of distress ...
As expensive cancer biologics move off patent, biosimilar products are coming on board. These are highly similar versions of licensed biologics that demonstrate near-fingerprint identity to their reference products in terms of structure and potency. Biosimilars represent a major opportunity for...
Formal discussant Jean-Charles Soria, MD, PhD, of Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France, and Editor-in-Chief of Annals of Oncology (the official journal of the European Society for Medical Oncology [ESMO]), tried to put these findings into perspective. He pointed out that when applying the...
Combining immunotherapy with a standard chemotherapy doublet appears to be an attractive option for the front-line treatment of advanced nonsquamous non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), according to the results of a phase II study presented at the 2016 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO)...
The formal discussant of this trial, Axel Bex, MD, PhD, of The Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, was cautious in interpreting these results to be practice-changing. “I congratulate the investigators for the first-ever positive trial for adjuvant treatment of renal cell carcinoma,” he...
Sunitinib (Sutent) improved disease-free survival by more than 1 year when used as adjuvant treatment for high-risk locoregional renal cell carcinoma following nephrectomy, but with the cost of toxicity. S-TRAC is the first phase III trial showing a benefit for adjuvant therapy in renal cell...
Formal discussant of this trial, Bernard Escudier, MD, Chairman of the Renal Cancer Unit at Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France, said: “The main question is whether this study will change practice.” He is not so sure it will and would like more data. Dr. Escudier told listeners that the...
Cabozantinib (Cabometyx) improved progression-free survival and response rates in patients with untreated metastatic renal cell carcinoma compared with the standard of care, sunitinib (Sutent), according to the results of a phase II multicenter randomized trial called CABOSUN reported at the 2016...
When I lost my only sister to breast cancer in 1986, patients like her had devastatingly few choices. Over the intervening decades, sustained commitment to biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and major technologic advances have led to transformative changes in cancer...
A study from the Duke Cancer Institute (DCI) has found a lack of statistical evidence to support the current practice of treating thyroid cancer patients under age 45 differently from those 45 and older. The study, published recently by Adam et al in the Journal of Clinical Oncology,...
On October 14, 2016, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced its final policy on what physicians need to do to begin implementing the Quality Payment Program outlined in the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA). The Quality Payment Program is a...
Corey J. Langer, MD, Director of Thoracic Oncology and Professor of Medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, discussed the OAK study with The ASCO Post. Robust Data “In some ways, the OAK data are some of the most robust we have seen in the second-line setting. For ...
On November 2, ASCO and Innovative Oncology Business Solutions, Inc, (IOBS) announced a new collaboration, ASCO COME HOME, an oncology medical home program designed to transition community oncology practices from volume-based to value-based care by structuring reimbursement around the full...
Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have developed a new personalized assessment tool that could better predict lung cancer risk in never, light, and heavy smokers using a large Taiwanese prospective cohort study. By incorporating risk factor—in addition to...
The programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) inhibitor atezolizumab (Tecentriq) significantly improved overall survival, compared to docetaxel, in previously treated, advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), according to preliminary results of the phase III OAK study. The findings are the first...
A study by University of North Carolina (UNC) Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers has found that younger, uninsured women in North Carolina had higher odds of missing a 60-day window for getting follow-up after an abnormal mammogram, even though research underscores the importance of ...
On November 1, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) accepted a New Drug Application (NDA) for filing and granted Priority Review for ribociclib (LEE011) as first-line treatment of postmenopausal women with hormone receptor–positive, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2...
In a letter to the editor in The New England Journal of Medicine, Hari et al described a sustained response to the anti-CD38 antibody daratumumab (Darzalex) in a patient with relapsed, refractory nasal-type extranodal natural killer (NK) cell–T-cell lymphoma. In September 2014, a 56-year-old ...
The addition of norethandrolone as maintenance therapy improved survival in patients aged ≥ 60 years with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), according to a French phase III trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Pigneux et al. In the open-label trial, 330 patients with de novo AML or...
A new American Cancer Society study finds that incidence of anal cancer has been increasing in women or in both men and women in 13 of 18 countries studied, particularly in the Americas, Northern/Western Europe, and Australia. The authors say population-based preventive measures, including human...
Positive results were announced on October 26, 2016, from the phase III SOLO-2 trial, designed to determine the efficacy of olaparib (Lynparza) tablets (300 mg twice daily) as a monotherapy for the maintenance treatment of platinum-sensitive, BRCA-mutated relapsed ovarian cancer. Results from the...
In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Biggers et al found that persistence and adherence with hormonal therapy for breast cancer were greater among black, Hispanic, and white women with vs without low-income prescription subsidies in Medicare Part D. The study involved 25,111...
The most comprehensive study of its kind to date found that older women enjoy the same benefits from breast reconstruction following mastectomy for breast cancer as younger women, without a significant increase in the risk for complications. As with patients across all age groups, the benefits of...
Thanks to advances in medical imaging, the detection rate for synchronous multiple lung adenocarcinoma has been on the rise. Cases of synchronous multiple lung adenocarcinoma in Japanese women have been on the rise, despite having a national smoking rate of less than 10% in recent years. This...
Patients with double-hit and double-expressor relapsed/refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphomas have poorer outcomes after autologous stem cell transplantation (ASCT), according to the findings of a retrospective analysis reported by Herrera et al in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Double-hit...
Venous thromboembolism is a serious—and sometimes fatal—complication of cancer and chemotherapy treatment. Since breast cancer is one of the most common cancers, it accounts for a large number of cancer-related cases of venous thromboembolism. Routine thromboprophylaxis, however, is not ...
In a single-center analysis reported in JAMA Oncology, Nead et al found that the use of androgen-deprivation therapy for prostate cancer was associated with an increased risk for dementia. The study involved electronic medical record data from the Stanford University Health System from 1994 to...
Painful sex in women after cancer treatment is relatively common, often treatable, and needs to be addressed by medical providers, a University of California (UC), Davis, oncologist and researcher suggests. Vanessa Kennedy, MD, a gynecologic oncologist at UC Davis Health System, said that with...
Medical researchers at Indiana University (IU) Bloomington have found evidence for a link between prostate cancer, which affects millions of men aged 50 and older, and Ewing's sarcoma, a rare form of cancer that affects children and young adults. The results of the study, reported by Kedage et al...
Although smoking prevalence in the U.S. has declined by more than half since 1965, nearly 40 million adults still smoke cigarettes, resulting in about 167,133 cancer deaths in 2014, according to a study by the American Cancer Society. The study investigated cancer deaths among adults 35 and older...
Patients with disseminated advanced cancer who undergo surgery are far more likely to endure long hospital stays and readmissions, referrals to extended care facilities, and death, University of California (UC) Davis researchers have found. Their study, published by Bateni et al in PLOS One,...
Among Japanese patients with esophageal cancer, those whose cancer tested positive for DNA from the bacterium Fusobacterium nucleatum had shorter cancer-specific survival compared with those whose cancer had no DNA from the bacterium, according to study results published by Yamamura et al in...
In a matched retrospective analysis reported in The Lancet Oncology, Zhao et al identified and validated a 24-gene predictor of response to postoperative radiotherapy in prostate cancer. The analysis involved data from patients from five published U.S. studies (cohort, case-cohort, and...
Mir et al found that regorafenib (Stivarga) was active in patients with advanced nonadipocytic soft-tissue sarcoma previously treated with an anthracycline, according to a French-Austrian phase II trial reported in The Lancet Oncology. Regorafenib should be evaluated further in this setting, the...
In a new report published by Young et al in Cancer Medicine, a two-gene circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) blood test for postsurgical monitoring of colorectal cancer (CRC) recurrence has been shown to detect twice the number of recurrence cases as carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) testing, a standard of...
Overall survival was poorer with isolated peritoneal metastasis in colorectal cancer vs other isolated sites of metastasis in patients receiving first-line systemic therapy but similar to that in patients with peritoneal plus another metastatic site and in patients with at least two nonperitoneal...
On October 24, 2016, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved pembrolizumab (Keytruda) for the treatment of patients with metastatic non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) whose tumors express programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) as determined by an FDA-approved test. This is the...
In a phase II trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Goss et al found that osimertinib produced a high response rate in EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor–pretreated EGFR Thr790Met (T790M)–positive advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Osimertinib is an EGFR tyrosine kinase...
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have recommended that 11- to 12-year-olds receive 2 doses of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine at least 6 months apart rather than the previously recommended 3 doses to protect against cancers caused by HPV infections. Teens and young adults who ...
Merck announced October 21, 2016, that the phase III KEYNOTE-045 trial investigating the use of pembrolizumab (Keytruda), the company’s anti–PD-1 (programmed cell death protein 1) therapy in patients with previously treated advanced urothelial cancer, met the primary endpoint of overall ...
In an Australian trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Dieng et al found that use of a psychoeducational intervention reduced the fear of cancer recurrence and stress among patients at high risk of developing a second primary melanoma. Study Details In the trial, 164 patients from 3 ...
Editor’s note: As The ASCO Post went to press, the Department of Health & Human Services finalized a landmark new payment system for Medicare clinicians. The system, known as MACRA, (Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015), replaces the flawed Sustainable Growth Rate and will...
Since the announcement of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Oncology Center of Excellence (OCE) on June 29, 2016, as part of the White House’s Cancer Moonshot, we’ve been working to further the FDA’s efforts to get new oncology products into the hands of patients. We are committed to...
Assessment of minimal residual disease was associated with improved prediction of outcome in responders, as well as complete responders, in patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) who respond to treatment. Kovacs et al reported these findings, which are based on an analysis of two phase...
A phase II study has found venetoclax (Venclexta) to be clinically active in patients with high-risk relapsed/refractory acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) or those unfit for intensive chemotherapy, with an overall response rate of 19% and a tolerable safety profile. The study results, which were...