On September 12, Lori J. Pierce, MD, FASTRO, FASCO, Board Chair of the Association for Clinical Oncology (ASCO), made the following statement: “President John F. Kennedy’s historic speech that inspired our nation and an entire generation of Americans to achieve manned space exploration underscored ...
In an international, multicenter phase II clinical trial, 63.3% of patients with stage II to IV cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma saw their tumors nearly or completely eradicated when treated with the anti–PD-1 agent cemiplimab-rwlc before surgery. The results were presented by Gross et al at the...
Physicians, care providers, and payers may be preparing for a major shift in early cancer detection that will affect almost every stage of cancer diagnosis and treatment. New data supporting the accuracy of multicancer early detection blood testing, presented by Deb Schrag, MD, FASCO, MPH, at the...
Patients with high-risk melanoma who received the anti–PD-1 therapy pembrolizumab both before and after surgery to remove cancerous tissue had a significantly lower risk of their cancer recurring than similar patients who received the drug only after surgery. These results from a study by the SWOG...
Patients who received fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki (T-DXd) for HER2-low metastatic breast cancer reported that the treatment maintained their quality of life compared to conventional chemotherapy, according to results presented by Ueno et al at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO)...
A novel treatment strategy with personalized cell therapy significantly improved progression-free survival compared to standard immunotherapy in patients with advanced melanoma, according to results from the phase III M14TIL trial reported by John Haanen, MD, PhD, and colleagues at the European...
Significant improvements in progression-free survival and response rate—combined with reduced symptoms and better quality of life—were reported as outcomes of a new treatment approach for patients with desmoid tumors, benign but locally aggressive and invasive soft-tissue tumors. Through targeting...
A targeted kinase inhibitor added to a two-drug immunotherapy combination slowed the progression of advanced kidney cancer in previously untreated patients, according to research led by Toni K. Choueiri, MD. Dr. Choueiri, who is the Director of the Lank Center for Genitourinary Cancer at...
The ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group presented data from PROSPER RCC (EA8143), the first randomized phase III trial of neoadjuvant immunotherapy in patients with kidney cancer, at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2022 (Abstract LBA67). Patients with high-risk renal cell...
A new mechanism has been identified through which very small pollutant particles in the air may trigger lung cancer in people who have never smoked, paving the way to new prevention approaches and the development of novel therapies, according to late-breaking data reported by Charles Swanton, MBBS, ...
On September 9, the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO), together with the European Oncology Nursing Society (EONS), announced the launch of the Europe-wide “Cancer Prevention Across Europe” campaign (PrEvCan) aimed at reducing the burden of cancer. The announcement was made at the opening ...
Perhaps the best known of all cancer predisposition genes are inherited mutations in the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2. They were originally associated with an increased risk of breast and ovarian cancers. Later studies revealed that they also increased the risk of prostate and pancreatic cancers and, in...
I was just 31 and about to give birth to my fourth child, Yitzchok, when I received a diagnosis of primary mediastinal large B-cell lymphoma. The news was terrifying and crippling. For months, I had been experiencing shortness of breath, coughing, and a pain in my left shoulder, all of which were...
EQRx is an economics professor’s dream company. It is the perfect example of the principle of substitution. EQRx provides quality, lower-cost drugs in high-cost categories that may substitute for the higher-priced options. Although the profit margin for each drug unit is smaller than the...
The numbers are dizzying. The costs of cancer care in the United States are rising so fast that by 2030, it is projected the national cancer-attributable costs will total more than $246 billion, up from $183 billion in 2015—a 34% increase.1 And although the total global economic burden of cancer is ...
Ashish Shah, MD, has assumed the newly created position of Director of Clinical Trials and Translational Research and principal investigator in the Section of Virology and Immunotherapy at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Brain Tumor Initiative (BTI) at the University of Miami Miller School ...
Update: On August 7, 2022, the Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a broad climate, tax, and health-care reconciliation bill, with a vote of 51 to 50. During a review of the IRA, the Senate parliamentarian removed provisions from the bill that would have required drug companies to pay...
ASCO has issued a new practice guideline update on the use of biomarkers in the management of metastatic breast cancer.1 The updated guideline revisits recommendations from the 2015 guideline and addresses topics that have emerged since then in the move toward personalized medicine in metastatic...
People with light skin tones are far more likely to develop melanoma than people with darker skin tones. This large disparity results from far more than can be explained by the ultraviolet (UV) protective effects of melanin pigment, owing in large part to the melanin precursor...
Over recent decades, more and more adults under the age of 50 are developing cancer. A recently published study revealed that the incidence of early-onset cancers (those diagnosed before age 50)—including breast, colon, esophageal, kidney, liver, and pancreatic cancers, among others—has...
March 2, 2009. Just published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.1 And we even got the cover. Twists and turns of heat shock protein-90 (Hsp90), the chaperone, the evolutionary capacitor. Great name and important cancer target. People smiled when I talked about this at the Hsp90 conference....
In 2019, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II appointed V. Craig Jordan, CMG, OBE, PhD, DSc, FMedSci, Companion of the Most Distinguished order of St. Michael and St. George (CMG), honoring his extraordinary scientific work in the development of selective estrogen receptor modulators, most notably...
When combined with radiotherapy as definitive treatment of locally advanced head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, cisplatin at a dose of 40 mg/m2 weekly is noninferior to cisplatin at 100 mg/m2 every 3 weeks, according to the results of the ConCERT trial.1 These findings were presented by Atul...
On September 5, 2022, the oncology community lost a pioneer in the treatment of Hodgkin lymphoma, Saul A. Rosenberg, MD, FASCO. Dr. Rosenberg was the Maureen Lyles D’Ambrogio Professor in the School of Medicine, Emeritus, at Stanford University. Together with the late Henry Kaplan, MD, Dr....
Nipple-sparing techniques can provide better outcomes for women undergoing breast reconstruction after mastectomy, but due to complication risks, these approaches are often not offered to women with sagging or larger breasts. For this group of patients, a “batwing” incision may provide a safer...
A team of researchers from the University of Rochester discovered how certain genetic mutations fuel the growth of cholangiocarcinoma, a rare but aggressive type of malignancy that has been on the rise in the United States. Their work, published by Guo et al in Cell Reports this week, details the...
Currently, there are two U.S. Food and Drug Administration–approved chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies targeting the B-cell maturation antigen (BCMA) for adult patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma: idecabtagene vicleucel and citacabtagene autoleucel. However, although ...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Herzog et al have developed a simple noninvasive test for screening for suspected endometrial cancer—the Women’s Cancer Risk Identification-Quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction Test for Endometrial Cancer (WID-qEC)—that has shown accuracy in...
A new clinical guideline from the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) provides recommendations on the use of radiation therapy to treat patients with isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH)-mutant grade 2 and grade 3 diffuse glioma. Evidence-based recommendations outline the multidisciplinary...
Intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) alone may be considered an effective treatment option for “low-risk” T1–2N1 and T3N0 nasopharyngeal carcinoma, according to trial data presented by Jun Ma, MD, MS, Professor of Radiation Oncology, Sun Yat-Sen University Cancer Center, Guangzhou, China,...
Alexander T. Pearson, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago, commended the artificial intelligence (AI)-augmented, ultrasound-based platform for screening and staging of thyroid cancer. “In this study, Dr. Chan and colleagues processed high-resolution ultrasound...
An artificial intelligence (AI) ultrasound platform that incorporates multiple methods of machine learning can accurately predict thyroid malignancy as well as pathologic and genomic outcomes, according to data presented at the 2022 Multidisciplinary Head and Neck Cancers Symposium.1 Findings from...
In a population-based age-period-cohort study reported in JAMA Oncology, Zhang et al estimated that current human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination rates will have a limited impact on overall oropharyngeal cancer incidence through 2045, due to a high risk of oropharyngeal cancer in unvaccinated...
De-escalated adjuvant radiotherapy appears to be safe in patients with surgically resectable, human papillomavirus (HPV)--positive oropharyngeal cancers, particularly in patients without extranodal extension or pN2 disease by American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) 8th edition. These findings...
Women with a breast cancer diagnosis undergoing procedures for fertility preservation are not at an increased risk for recurrence of the disease or disease-specific mortality, according to the results of a study from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden that followed participants for 5 years on...
According to Quynh-Thu Le, MD, FACR, FASTRO, Professor and Chair of Radiation Oncology at Stanford, these results suggest that monitoring circulating human papillomavirus (HPV) DNA may lead to the detection of relapse prior to imaging. In an interview with The ASCO Post, Dr. Le also noted that...
A blood-basedliquid biopsy may accurately predict recurrence of human papillomavirus (HPV)-driven oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma following treatment, according to data presented at the 2022 Multidisciplinary Head and Neck Cancers Symposium.1 Results of the large, multi-institutional study...
Advanced radiotherapy techniques may reduce the risk of severe and debilitating toxicity associated with radiation, but not all patients have equal access to these modalities, according to data presented at the 2022 Multidisciplinary Head and Neck Cancers Symposium.1 Retrospective analysis of the...
The addition of the checkpoint inhibitor tislelizumab to first-line chemotherapy significantly reduced the risk of disease progression or death by 50% and, despite a 49% crossover rate, numerically boosted overall survival in patients with recurrent or metastatic nasopharyngeal cancer, Zhang et al...
Head and neck cancer is the seventh most common cancer in the world, with 1.1 million new diagnoses reported annually.1 In the United States, the incidence of oral and pharyngeal cancers is over 54,000 cases per year, resulting in over 11,000 yearly deaths.2 Although smoking and alcohol consumption ...
In a multinational study using artificial intelligence (AI), investigators developed an algorithm to improve the prediction of colorectal cancer recurrence. Study results were published by Pai et al in Gastroenterology. QuantCRC Rish K. Pai, MD, PhD, a pathologist at Mayo Clinic in Arizona and...
A new study published by Birhiray et al in Blood Advances outlines practical strategies for promoting diversity, equity, inclusion, and access in cancer clinical research. The study highlights significant racial disparities in cancer research, citing that between 2008 and 2018, only 7.8% of...
Researchers have identified biological markers in patients with triple-negative breast cancer that are associated with resistance to chemotherapy. The study was published by Anurag et al in the journal Cancer Discovery and was funded by the National Cancer Institute’s Clinical Proteomics Tumor...
In our continuing effort to connect and learn more about our international oncology colleagues, The ASCO Post recently spoke with Rossana Berardi, MD, Professor in Medical Oncology and Director of the Postgraduate School of Oncology at the Università Politecnica Marche, Ancona, Italy, where she is...
Pilar Garrido, MD, PhD, is Head of the Medical Oncology Department, University Hospital Ramón y Cajal, Madrid. She is also Co-Director of the Cancer Research Group at Instituto Ramón y Cajal de Investigación Sanitaria (IRYCIS). Her main areas of research and clinical interest are thoracic tumors,...
“I now think of prostate cancer as a story of success for many men, given the advancements in both research and treatment options over the past decade,” Behfar Ehdaie, MD, MPH, told The ASCO Post. Dr. Ehdaie is lead author of a study that found MRI-guided focused ultrasound focal therapy is safe...
MRI-guided focused ultrasound focal therapy produced “a high degree of success” and “a low rate of genitourinary adverse events” when used to treat select patients with intermediate-grade prostate cancer, Behfar Ehdaie, MD, MPH, and colleagues reported in The Lancet Oncology.1 Dr. Ehdaie is...
African Americans have been underrepresented in tobacco treatment research, including the clinical trials that led to the 2006 U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of varenicline (Chantix), the leading pharmacologic treatment for smoking cessation. Meanwhile, African Americans suffer higher...
My diagnosis of terminal prostate cancer 3 years ago was filled with irony. As an interventional radiologist, I have treated hundreds of patients with advanced prostate cancer, and I knew my prognosis wasn’t good. After experiencing some of the common symptoms of the cancer, including voiding...
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, Ting Bao, MD, DABMA, MS, and Jyothirmai Gubili, MS, focus on the herb dong...