Conquer Cancer, the ASCO Foundation, is raising money through COVID Impacts Cancer, an emergency campaign to support patients with cancer, cancer care teams, and researchers. This fund will aid in advancing vital cancer research and expanding support for patients and oncology providers during and...
On her wedding day, a father—who happens to have colorectal cancer—walks his daughter down the aisle. His oncologist, Rona Yaeger, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, helped him mark this milestone. Currently, patients with BRAF-mutant colorectal cancers face a poor prognosis. Dr....
The fundamental goal of scientific meetings is to share knowledge and accelerate scientific advances. Investigators use different types of presentations to disseminate and share their valuable work with others in the field. This is an important aspect of promoting their scientific careers. These...
The doctor-patient relationship, a time-honored tradition based on trust and cooperation, is critical for vulnerable patients, as they experience a heightened reliance on the physician’s competence, skills, and good will. That same trust is critical on the public health stage, when a nation is...
The ASCO Post is pleased to reproduce installments of Art of Oncology as published previously in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. These articles focus on the experience of suffering from cancer or of caring for people diagnosed with cancer, and they include narratives, topical essays, historical...
In 2003, Nina Kadan-Lottick, MD, MSPH, established the regional Yale HEROS multidisciplinary research and clinical program for long-term survivors of childhood cancer survivors, which is the first of its kind in Connecticut and one of the first in the United States. She intends the HEROS program to ...
Most who leave a mark in life are noted for a single contribution; few are remembered for the breadth of their contributions. Such a man was John W. Yarbro, MD, PhD, who, near the end of his rich life, stepped foot on Antarctica, completing his desire to have visited all of the world’s seven...
My journey in cancer medicine started in June 1968, when I traveled from Lebanon to New York to begin my fellowship in medical oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Since then, and on a daily basis, I have been actively engaged in the treatment of patients with cancer and in cancer...
During the COVID-19 pandemic, The ASCO Post will be interviewing oncologists on how they and their centers are dealing with the crisis. Here, we speak with Alexander Melamed, MD, MPH, a gynecologic oncologist and Assistant Professor of Obstetrics & Gynecology at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia...
Medical images for a wide range of diseases, including COVID-19, can now be more easily viewed, compared, and analyzed using a Web-based imaging platform developed by Massachusetts General Hospital and collaborating researchers. The Open Health Imaging Foundation (OHIF) Web viewer was originally...
Reports suggest that the severity of coronavirus infection may be significantly more pronounced in men than in women.1 Studies have demonstrated that estrogen reduces both influenza virus replication in human female nasal epithelial cells2 and moderates the cytokine storm in murine models of this...
As part of a series of interviews with cancer experts during the COVID-19 pandemic, The ASCO Post spoke with Hagop Kantarjian, MD, Professor and Chair of the Department of Leukemia at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, about the impact of the pandemic on treatment of...
A new study has begun recruiting at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, to determine how many adults in the United States without a confirmed history of infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, have antibodies to the virus. The presence of antibodies in...
The management of pediatric brain and spinal cord tumors is extremely complex, as are the survivorship issues in this highly vulnerable patient population. To shed light on the current clinical reality in this setting, The ASCO Post recently spoke with Katherine E. Warren, MD, an internationally...
You’ve agreed to be interviewed on Zoom. If you’re like most people, the technology itself isn’t a barrier. (And if it is, you can consult our step-by-step guide to using Zoom at https://bit.ly/2yxcTN0.) However, you might be less sure about what you can do to make the best impression (and the most ...
In 2019, the Penn Center for Cancer Care Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania’s Abramson Cancer Center began planning a demonstration program, called Cancer Care at Home, to broaden the delivery of oncology treatments to patients in the home setting. The existing services offered by Penn...
Genetic mapping of brain metastases, in the laboratory of Priscilla Brastianos, MD, Director of the Central Nervous System Metastasis Center at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, and Scott Carter, PhD, at the Harvard School of Public Health, is yielding findings that could...
City of Hope has announced the addition of pathologist Stanley Hamilton, MD, and researcher Alexey Danilov, MD, PhD, to the National Medical Center in Duarte, California. Dr. Hamilton is a recognized leader in pathology who helped develop pathology and laboratory medicine into a world-class...
The Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute recently announced that breast surgeon Eric A. Brown, MD, FACS, has joined its medical team. Board-certified in general surgery and breast ultrasound, Dr. Brown will serve as co-leader of the Breast Cancer Multidisciplinary Team, alongside Michael Simon,...
The desire to pursue a career in medicine took root when Lori J. Pierce, MD, FASTRO, FASCO, was a young child visiting family in segregated Ahoskie, North Carolina. She witnessed firsthand the impact the town’s lone African American family physician had on the community. When it came time to...
As the worldwide cases of the coronavirus started to mount in February and March, medical societies and organizations monitoring the escalating COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on international and domestic travel made the difficult decision to postpone or cancel their scientific conferences. On...
When I chose my Presidential theme for the 2020 ASCO Annual Meeting, “Unite and Conquer: Accelerating Progress Together,” in early 2019, I never imagined it would take on a new meaning 12 months later. The world is grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic, and, even as we practice social distancing, I...
AS I WRITE TO YOU, I am happy to report I have just completed a 7-day rotation at the COVID-19 inpatient service at my hospital in New York City! Overall, it was a positive experience, despite the occasional sad and scary moments. I left the service feeling uplifted and fulfilled. I am glad to have ...
In a research letter published by Fritz et al in the journal Allergy, researchers reported that the common allergy medications desloratadine and loratadine may be associated with improved survival in patients with malignant melanoma. “Previous studies have shown that the same antihistamines have...
A NEW ONLINE GUIDE provides tips to help oncology and other clinicians navigate the difficult and distressing communications with patients that have arisen during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anthony Back, MD, a medical oncologist and palliative medicine specialist at the University of Washington and...
ASCO has released the ASCO Special Report: A Guide to Cancer Care Delivery During the COVID-19 Pandemic, which provides detailed guidance to oncology practices on the immediate and short-term steps that could be taken to help protect the safety of patients and health-care staff before resuming more ...
Although the live 2020 National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Annual Conference was canceled, more than 100 posters scheduled for presentation are now available online, as part of the NCCN 2020 Virtual Annual Conference. The ASCO Post has summarized some of the clinical trial updates we found ...
People who quit smoking at any time—even 2 years before a lung cancer diagnosis—improve their chances of survival after being diagnosed with the disease, according to the results of a large international study presented by Fares et al in a press briefing in advance of the ASCO20 Virtual Scientific...
"We have known for a long time, based on good evidence, that geriatric assessment is good at accurately identifying patients at high risk for chemotherapy-induced toxicity, surgical complications, and increased hospitalizations. This study adds an intervention component based on the geriatric...
The COVID-19 pandemic transformed cancer care, seemingly overnight, as practices scrambled to ensure a safe environment for caregivers and patients. Although regulatory burdens have been relaxed to allow patients to continue on trial treatment and telemedicine has expanded its competency and reach, ...
The universe has an intriguing way of registering our wishes and delivering them in convoluted, mutated forms. Last winter, I recall coming home after a long day at the hospital and being ambushed by my 3-year-old daughter and preteen son. She wanted to play, he needed help with homework, and they ...
In my native language, there is a saying that is translated as, “A child who does not travel only appreciates their mother’s cooking.” In the broad sense, as we grow up and experience the different things that life has to offer, two things happen if we allow our minds to open up: we realize there...
In hindsight, the symptoms I began experiencing in the fall of 2013—sudden excruciating back bone pain and severe fatigue—should have tipped me off that I had a serious disease, but 7 years ago, they were easy to explain away. The bone pain was similar to what I had experienced several years...
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, in partnership with the International Society of Paediatric Oncology (SIOP), has launched the Global COVID-19 Observatory and Resource Center for Childhood Cancer. The website offers health-care providers around the world a space to share the latest...
The ASCO Post is pleased to reproduce installments of the Art of Oncology as published previously in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. These articles focus on the experience of suffering from cancer or of caring for people diagnosed with cancer, and they include narratives, topical essays,...
Patient-reported outcomes are measures used in clinical trials to capture aspects of a patient’s health condition, reported directly by the patient, without introduction of bias from third parties. They are distinct from the physical toxicities reported by clinicians1 and are collected using a...
In the treatment of HER2-positive early breast cancer, patients who receive dual HER2-targeted therapy in both the neoadjuvant and adjuvant settings are less likely to experience recurrence than those who received dual therapy only as neoadjuvant treatment, according to a pooled analysis of...
Virginia Kaklamani, MD, DSc, Professor of Medicine and Head of the Breast Cancer Program at UT Health San Antonio MD Anderson Cancer Center, moderated a press conference where Milan Radovich, PhD, reported the robust ability of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) and circulating tumor cells to predict...
In early triple-negative breast cancer, the presence of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) and circulating tumor cells after neoadjuvant chemotherapy may enable risk stratification of patients for disease recurrence and may predict outcomes, according to a preplanned correlative analysis of the phase II ...
Studies of second-generation bispecific antibodies were among the highlights of the 2019 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition. The bispecific T-cell engager blinatumomab was the first such agent to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in...
As germline genetic testing becomes more widespread among patients with breast cancer, recommendations for the appropriate management of patients with hereditary breast cancer are needed. Until now, no ASCO guideline has addressed the management of hereditary breast cancer, even for carriers of...
Can patients with breast cancer who achieve an “exceptional response” to neoadjuvant therapy safely forgo surgery? That is a question being seriously explored in multinational trials. “We’ve known for a long time that we can eliminate disease in many patients if they have chemosensitive tumors....
Immunotherapy is showing promise for patients with rare cancers, offering new treatment opportunities and clinical trials to those with previously limited options. At the 2020 ASCO-SITC Clinical Immuno-Oncology Symposium, presenters discussed the use of immunotherapy in three low-incidence cancers: ...
Omid Hamid, MD, Chief of Research/Immuno-Oncology, The Angeles Clinic & Research Institute, and Co-Director of the Cutaneous Malignancy Program at Cedars-Sinai Cancer Center, Los Angeles, commented on these two studies for The ASCO Post. According to Dr. Hamid, the findings for the tumor...
Based on multiple phase III prospective trials, there is evidence that both PARP inhibitors and antiangiogenic therapies such as bevacizumab provide benefit when utilized in a maintenance strategy in the first-line treatment of advanced epithelial ovarian cancer (GOG 218, ICON7, SOLO-1, PRIMA,...
In anticipation of how the COVID-19 pandemic might impact oncology care as the coronavirus spread across New York City, radiation oncologists with expertise in the management of metastatic disease and inpatient oncologic emergencies at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) met in late winter ...
Patients with cancer who were infected with COVID-19 were much more likely to die from the disease than those without cancer, according to research from physician-researchers at Montefiore Health System and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Their findings were published by Mehta et al in Cancer...
The treatment of colorectal cancer has always been something of an art—but never more so than during the COVID-19 pandemic. The ASCO Post asked three experts in this malignancy to share their concerns and their approaches to achieving good patient outcomes while minimizing the risk of COVID-19...
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is perhaps the biggest challenge health-care systems have ever had to face. As part of a series of interviews The ASCO Post is conducting with oncologists, we talked with Charles G. Drake, MD, PhD, about the impact of COVID-19 on his practice and on the conduct...
Before the dawn of the modern antibiotic era and amid the chaos of World War II, future Professor of Radiology and Founding Dean of two American medical colleges, Dr. George T. Harrell,* penned what could now be argued was far too bold a statement. As the opening lines of his nonrandomized study...