A combination of the kinase inhibitor cabozantinib and the immunotherapy nivolumab may make curative surgery possible for some patients with liver cancer who would generally not be considered candidates for surgery, according to research published by Ho et al in Nature Cancer. Rates of Resection...
Invited discussant Giuseppe Curigliano, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Medical Oncology at the University of Milan, Italy, and Head of the Division of Early Drug Development at the European Institute of Oncology, said the “clear” findings of KEYNOTE-5221 are “practice-changing.” However, the...
The latest analysis of the pivotal phase III KEYNOTE-522 trial demonstrated significant improvements in clinical outcomes with pembrolizumab plus chemotherapy vs chemotherapy alone as a neoadjuvant/adjuvant treatment of triple-negative breast cancer.1 This is the first large, randomized, phase III...
Worldwide, the global average surface temperature has risen at a similar rate of 0.17°F per decade since 1901, with the warmest year on record occurring in 2016 and the second warmest occurring in 2020. However, according to NOAA, since the late 1970s, the United States has warmed faster than the...
Chemotherapy has helped make acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) one of the most survivable childhood cancers. Now, a research team has shown how thiopurines may lead to mutations that set patients up for disease relapse. These findings were published by Yang et al in Nature Cancer. The research...
Over 90% of patients with head and neck cancer receiving curative-intent chemoradiation therapy found weekly palliative care visits to be a valuable addition to their treatment, a recent study published by Bauman et al in the Journal of Palliative Medicine found. Although palliative care is known...
In this video, Drs. Sara A. Hurvitz, William J. Gradishar, and Sara M. Tolaney discuss current treatment options for newly diagnosed HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer. Dr. Hurvitz presents the case of a 49-year-old perimenopausal Latina woman with intermediate-grade T2N1 left breast cancer...
Individuals with cancer or a history of cancer should be eligible for clinical trials—including COVID-19 vaccine trials—unless there is safety justification for exclusion, ASCO and Friends of Cancer Research (Friends) asserted in a recently released joint position statement. To date, clinical...
On March 3, 2021, lorlatinib was granted regular approval for treatment of patients with metastatic non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with ALK-positive tumors as detected by a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved test.1,2 The FDA simultaneously approved the Ventana ALK (D5F3) CDx Assay ...
On March 22, 2021, pembrolizumab was approved for use in combination with platinum- and fluoropyrimidine-based chemotherapy for patients with metastatic or locally advanced esophageal or gastroesophageal junction (tumors with epicenter 1 to 5 cm above the gastroesophageal junction) carcinoma who...
According to Shonta Chambers, MSW, Executive Vice President of Health Equity Initiatives and Community Engagement, Patient Advocate Foundation, the social determinants of health that hinder people’s ability to access and adhere to cancer care cannot be ignored if health equity is to be achieved....
Created more than a decade ago, the Office of Minority Health (OMH) and the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities have a mission to advance the health of racial and ethnic minority populations through policies, programs, and partnerships at the Centers for Medicare and...
The COVID-19 pandemic may have put the world on pause, but it also showed the medical community that rapid progress is possible with focus and collaboration. During the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Virtual Oncology Policy Summit, “Defining the ‘New Normal’ 2021 and the State of...
According to George W. Sledge, Jr, MD, FASCO, Professor of Medicine in the Division of Oncology at Stanford University Medical Center, by the beginning of the next decade, clinicians will be aided by the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in many facets of care and by the approval of a wave of new ...
Fabrice André, MD, PhD, Director of Research and Professor of Medical Oncology at Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France, commented on the two studies that used the MammaPrint 70-gene signature to identify patients for de-escalation or escalation of endocrine therapy.1,2 The push to...
Invited study discussant Lisa Horvath, PhD, MBBS, a medical oncologist at Chris O’Brien Lifehouse, University of Sydney, Australia, commented on the results of the EORTC 1333/PEACE III trial: “It was good to see the fracture rate in the radium-223 arm did, in fact, improve. However, what I found...
On March 10, 2021, the VEGF tyrosine kinase inhibitor tivozanib was approved for treatment of adults with relapsed or refractory advanced renal cell carcinoma following at least two prior systemic therapies.1,2 Supporting Efficacy Data Approval was based on findings in the open-label, phase III...
On April 22, 2021, the PD-1 inhibitor dostarlimab-gxly was granted accelerated approval for treatment of adults with mismatch repair–deficient recurrent or advanced endometrial cancer, as determined by a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved test, that has progressed on or following a...
Canada’s publicly funded health-care system has a complex drug approval and funding process. Due to multiple assessment steps and bureaucratic processes, newly developed cancer drugs can often experience long delays before oncologists may use them to treat their patients with cancer. Several...
Invited discussant of the FORWARD II trial,1Amit M. Oza, MD, MBBS, concluded that bevacizumab and mirvetuximab soravtansine was a “very well tolerated and effective” combination with “encouraging activity,” even in patients previously treated with bevacizumab and weekly paclitaxel. Dr. Oza is Head ...
On March 5, 2021, the CD19-directed genetically modified autologous T-cell immunotherapy axicabtagene ciloleucel was granted accelerated approval for treatment of adults with relapsed or refractory follicular lymphoma after two or more lines of systemic therapy.1,2 Axicabtagene ciloleucel is...
In the phase III GLOW trial, the all-oral regimen of fixed-duration ibrutinib plus venetoclax as first-line treatment for older or unfit patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) showed superior efficacy compared with chlorambucil and obinutuzumab.1Kostas Stamatopoulos, MD, PhD, of the...
Thoracic medical oncologist Sukhmani K. Padda, MD, was recently selected to direct Thoracic Medical Oncology at Cedars-Sinai Cancer Center in Los Angeles. Dr. Padda’s appointment, following a national search, reflects her breadth of experience as a clinician and researcher in the field of thoracic...
Fixed-duration ibrutinib and venetoclax as a first-line treatment yielded superior outcomes compared with chlorambucil plus obinutuzumab in patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), based on the primary analysis of the phase III GLOW trial presented during the European Hematology...
Women account for a growing proportion of the oncology workforce. Multiple studies, however, show that women oncologists are underrepresented in leadership positions, may have significantly lower salaries than men, and may be subjected to discriminatory practices stimulated by a medical culture...
On June 16, 2021, avapritinib was approved for the treatment of adult patients with advanced systemic mastocytosis, including patients with aggressive systemic mastocytosis, systemic mastocytosis with an associated hematological neoplasm, and mast cell leukemia.1,2 Avapritinib is not recommended...
Commenting on the updated results of the MAIA trial1 for The ASCO Post was Philip McCarthy, MD, Professor of Oncology and Internal Medicine and Director of the Transplant and Cellular Therapy Center at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, Buffalo, New York. Dr. McCarthy described how the...
Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in women of reproductive age. Approximately 10% of breast cancers are diagnosed in this age group.1 Young age at diagnosis is an adverse prognostic factor, and most young women will be offered chemotherapy and/or endocrine therapy, both of which ...
“The phase III ENGOT/GCIG study1 proved to be negative, with no advantage seen with the extension of bevacizumab treatment,” said the abstract’s invited discussant, Carol Aghajanian, MD, Chief of the Medical Gynecologic Oncology Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York. Dr....
A study published by D. Ross Camidge, MD, PhD, and colleagues in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology has helped to define MET amplification as a rare but potentially actionable driver for non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Dr. Camidge said many of the major developments in the treatment of NSCLC have ...
A study from the UNC Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention (HPDP) estimates that annual costs associated with metastatic breast cancer treatment among women in the United States will total $152.4 billion in 2030—nearly two and a half times the estimate for 2015 costs—due to an increase ...
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...
In a U.S. and Swiss study, nearly all patients with cancer developed an immune response to COVID-19 mRNA vaccines 3 to 4 weeks after receiving their second dose. However, a small group of the patients exhibited no response, raising questions about how their protection against the virus will be...
Obese patients with colorectal cancer receive lower cumulative doses of adjuvant chemotherapy relative to their body surface area than nonobese patients, according to results from a large meta-analysis reported by Slawinski et al at the ESMO World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer 2021 (Abstract...
Pediatric melanoma is a rare disease, with only around 400 cases diagnosed in the United States every year. To better understand this disease and how best to treat it, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists created a registry called Molecular Analysis of Childhood MELanocytic Tumors...
Black men most likely to benefit from advanced prostate cancer therapies are 11% less likely to receive them than non-Black men. This happens despite apparent equal opportunities in obtaining health-care services, a new study focused on American veterans has shown. Disparities Exposed Published by...
The past 2 decades have seen so many advances in the treatment of multiple myeloma; in addition, median patient survival has grown from just 3 years in the late 1990s to between 8 and 10 years today,1 with some patients exceeding that prognosis by many years. Although still considered a stubbornly...
India has witnessed a major paradigm shift in the field of breast cancer and its management over the past 4 decades. The discipline of medical oncology has evolved exponentially over this period—a growth that few other scientific disciplines have experienced. Interventions at the individual,...
Perhaps my 35-year career as a surgical oncologist and researcher specializing in soft-tissue sarcomas should have prepared me to recognize the signs of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) when they first appeared a few days before Christmas in 2016, but it did not. In fact, my symptoms were so...
Albert Einstein Cancer Center (AECC), Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Montefiore Health System have announced that cancer biologist Julio Aguirre-Ghiso, PhD, has been named founding Director of the Cancer Dormancy and Tumor Microenvironment Institute (CDTMI), Director of the Gruss-Lipper...
In patients with triple-negative breast cancer who have residual disease after neoadjuvant chemotherapy, adjuvant capecitabine remains the standard of care. In the multicenter randomized noninferiority EA1131 trial, which included primarily basal tumors, noninferiority of adjuvant platinum over...
Invited discussant 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 one ...
In this installment of the occasional department on Global Health-Care Equity, Guest Editor, Chandrakanth Are, MBBS, MBA, FRCS, FACS, spoke with Augusto Leon, MD, a surgical oncologist and Head of the Program of Cancer at Pontifical University of Chile, Santiago. Dr. Are is JL & CJ Varner...
Although we are just halfway through 2021, the outlook for improvements in global cancer trends looks grim. According to new estimates by the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s Global Cancer Observatory, the global cancer burden rose to 19.3 million cases and 10 million deaths in 2020...
On May 20, 2021, nivolumab was approved for adjuvant treatment of patients with completely resected esophageal or gastroesophageal junction (GEJ) cancer with residual pathologic disease after neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy.1,2 Supporting Efficacy Data Approval was based on findings from the...
On this week's episode, we’re discussing the effect of a 5- vs 2-year course of zoledronate for patients with early breast cancer; a recent FDA approval in locally advanced cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma; and a study that examined how reduced time to completion of treatment in patients with...
Research published by Pratt et al in Annals of Surgical Oncology showed an increase in survival rates when treatment options—surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation—are completed within 38 weeks from the time of diagnosis for patients with breast cancer. Optimal Treatment Duration The observational...
Mutations in a gene related to HER2, a gene frequently implicated in breast cancers and a variety of other malignancies, can amplify activity that spurs tumor growth, according to a new study. The findings, published by Hanker et al in Cancer Cell, could explain why many patients with HER2...
With several pivotal trials providing evidence for the escalation and de-escalation of anti-HER2 therapy in certain early breast cancer scenarios, personalized treatment is possible. How can clinicians optimize treatment by applying the studies’ findings? Debu Tripathy, MD, Professor and Chair of...
About 80% of breast cancer cases are hormone receptor–positive, according to the American Cancer Society. Patients with estrogen receptor–positive breast cancer generally are treated using therapy that inhibits both estrogen levels and cell-cycle activity, but about 90% of patients with metastatic...