Tumor budding is an emerging prognostic biomarker in colon cancer and currently influences decision-making in patients with pT1 and stage II colon cancer. In stage III colon cancer, its prognostic impact has been limited to small and retrospective cohorts. In a post hoc analysis of the IDEA-France...
Black adult patients are more likely than White patients to receive substandard gastrointestinal cancer surgery, according to a large study led by researchers at Yale Cancer Center published by Bakkila et al in JAMA Network Open. “The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light previously reported race...
Norman E. Sharpless, MD, has announced that he has decided to step down from his position as Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, a position he has held since 2017. Dr. Sharpless will continue as NCI Director through April 29, 2022, to allow...
On April 1, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved axicabtagene ciloleucel (Yescarta) for adult patients with large B-cell lymphoma (LBCL) who are refractory to first-line chemoimmunotherapy or who experienced relapse within 12 months of first-line chemoimmunotherapy. It is not...
A consensus reached by a lung cancer clinical community within the International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership (ICBP) presented by Lynch et al at the European Lung Cancer Congress (Abstract 196P) has highlighted international disparities in the management and outcomes of patients with lung cancer ...
In this video, Drs. Richard Stone, Courtney DiNardo, and Eunice Wang discuss therapy options for minimal residual disease (MRD)-positive acute myeloid leukemia (AML). The case is a 44-year-old man with no past medical history who presents with fevers and fatigue. He is diagnosed with AML and...
In this video, Drs. Richard Stone, Courtney DiNardo, and Eunice Wang treatment options for primary refractory FLT3-ITD–positive acute myeloid leukemia (AML). The case is a 60-year-old man with a history of hypertension and hyperlipidemia who presents with fatigue. He is diagnosed with...
In this video, Drs. Richard Stone, Courtney DiNardo, and Eunice Wang discuss the management of newly diagnosed older patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). The case is a 75-year-old woman with no past medical history who presents with fever and bone pain. She is diagnosed with AML, and...
This is Part 1 of Updates in Acute Myeloid Leukemia, a four-part video roundtable series. Scroll down to watch the other videos from this Roundtable. In this video, Drs. Richard Stone, Courtney DiNardo, and Eunice Wang discuss the management of newly diagnosed younger patients with acute myeloid...
More than half of patients diagnosed with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) undergo biomarker testing, and this figure has increased over the past 5 years, according to real-world data from a Spanish national registry study reported by Calvo de Juan et al at the European Lung Cancer...
Black patients with cancer experienced significantly worse outcomes after a COVID-19 diagnosis than non-Hispanic White patients, according to findings published by Fu et al in JAMA Network Open. Investigators from the COVID-19 and Cancer Consortium (CCC19) studied the electronic health records of...
New research has found that the weakened immune systems of patients with lymphoma may improve after they receive a third COVID-19 vaccination. Patients with lymphoma have defects in their immune system that restrict its response to vaccination; despite this, a study published by Lim et al in Nature ...
Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, the number of attacks on health-care facilities continues to mount. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as of March 16, there have been 43 attacks on health facilities, including 34 attacks that have directly impacted health facilities and...
The invited discussant of the CodeBreaK 100 data, E. Gabriela Chiorean, MD, Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and Clinical Director of the Gastrointestinal Medical Oncology program at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, found the efficacy of ...
Promising activity in metastatic pancreatic cancer was shown by sotorasib, an inhibitor of the KRAS G12C mutation, in the phase I/II CodeBreaK 100 study presented by John H. Strickler, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine at Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, during the February ...
The ASCO Post invited Mandana Kamgar, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin, LaBahn Pancreatic Cancer Program, Milwaukee, to comment on the KRYSTAL-1 trial. “The KRYSTAL-1 study in totality is a multiphase and multiarm ongoing study exploring the role of...
A disease control rate of 100% was achieved in gastrointestinal cancers treated with the KRAS G12C inhibitor adagrasib in the phase II KRYSTAL-1 trial, presented at the 2022 ASCO Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium.1 The population included primarily those with pancreatic cancer; other noncolorectal ...
Anthony El-Khoueiry, MD, Member of the Section of Gastrointestinal Cancers, Director of the phase I program, and Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California and USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, said the findings of the...
Patients with advanced, unresectable hepatocellular carcinoma may be gaining another first-line treatment option. In the global phase III HIMALAYA trial, a single priming dose of tremelimumab plus regular-interval durvalumab significantly improved overall survival, according to Ghassan K....
Invited discussant Ian Chau, MD, Consultant Medical Oncologist at The Royal Marsden Hospital in London and Surrey in the United Kingdom, said the findings from COSMIC-312 are not mature enough to establish cabozantinib/atezolizumab as a new front-line option for advanced hepatocellular carcinoma...
The phase III COSMIC-312 study has met its primary endpoint, showing a significant improvement in progression-free survival with cabozantinib plus atezolizumab compared with sorafenib in treatment-naive hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), investigators reported at a European Society for Medical...
The invited discussant of the RATIONALE 208 trial, Chris Verslype, MD, PhD, Professor of Medicine at University Hospitals Leuven in Belgium, said tislelizumab is an “active and safe” investigational PD-1 antibody, “comparable to other PD-1 agents.” In particular, he noted, the results of RATIONALE...
With the investigational checkpoint inhibitor tislelizumab, durable responses were achieved by some patients with previously treated advanced hepatocellular carcinoma, regardless of the number of prior lines of therapy, in the phase II RATIONALE 208 trial. These findings were presented during the...
Nilofer Azad, MD, Professor of Oncology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Co-Director of Cancer Genetics and Epigenetics at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, Baltimore, was invited to discuss the results of the phase III TOPAZ-1 study, which found an overall survival...
For the first time, a phase III study has shown an overall survival benefit for upfront treatment using immunotherapy plus chemotherapy in advanced biliary tract cancer. In the TOPAZ-1 trial, the addition of the anti–PD-L1 agent durvalumab to gemcitabine plus cisplatin significantly improved...
As reported in JAMA Oncology by Andrew X. Zhu, MD, PhD, and colleagues, the final overall survival analysis of the pivotal phase III ClarIDHy trial showed prolonged overall survival with ivosidenib vs placebo in previously treated patients with unresectable or metastatic cholangiocarcinoma and an...
As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine by Ronan J. Kelly, MB BCh, MBA, of The Charles A. Sammons Cancer Center at Baylor University Medical Center, and colleagues, an interim analysis of the phase III CheckMate 577 trial has shown a significant improvement in disease-free survival with ...
Gabriel A. Brooks, MPH, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, Norris Cotton Cancer Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, was invited to discuss the results of the ACCENT/IDEA database analysis of early treatment discontinuation in stage III colon cancer. Although the results confirm the...
For patients with stage III colon cancer, early discontinuation of adjuvant chemotherapy leads to worse outcomes—but early discontinuation of oxaliplatin did not. These findings, which came from an analysis of the large ACCENT and IDEA clinical trials databases, were presented at the 2022 ASCO...
Rona Yaeger, MD, Assistant Attending Physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, offered her thoughts on the findings of Morris et al for the combination regimen of encorafenib, cetuximab, and nivolumab in microsatellite-stable BRAF V600E–mutated metastatic colorectal cancer...
The combination of encorafenib, cetuximab, and nivolumab produced responses in 50% of patients and disease control in 96% of patients with microsatellite-stable BRAF V600E–mutated metastatic colorectal cancer in a phase I/II trial reported at the 2022 ASCO Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium. The...
As reported in Nature by Yelena Y. Janjigian, MD, of the Gastrointestinal Oncology Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and colleagues, the first interim analysis of the phase III KEYNOTE-811 trial has shown a significantly higher objective response rate with the addition of...
Over the past year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted approval to several novel drugs and new indications for older therapeutic agents used in gastrointestinal oncology. Cetuximab Plus Encorafenib On September 28, 2021, cetuximab (Erbitux) was approved in combination with encorafenib...
Benoit Rousseau, MD, PhD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, called the findings of the phase II GERCOR NIPICOL trial “interesting and convincing.” Long-term follow-up showed the 3-year progression-free survival rate to be 70% after 1 total year of treatment with nivolumab plus...
Samuel J. Klempner, MD, Associate Professor at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, commented on the NEONIPIGA study for The ASCO Post. “This study was the first prospective data set to show what many have suspected—that neoadjuvant immune checkpoint blockade would lead to a...
The phase II GERCOR NIPICOL study evaluated 1 year of treatment with nivolumab plus ipilimumab in patients with chemotherapy-resistant metastatic colorectal cancer whose tumors were microsatellite instability–high (MSI-H) or mismatch repair–deficient (dMMR). With this shortened treatment duration,...
In a prespecified analysis of the phase II CodeBreaK100 trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Marwan Fakih, MD, and colleagues found that the KRAS G12C protein inhibitor sotorasib showed modest activity in patients with previously treated KRAS G12C–mutant colorectal cancer.1 Study Details The...
In patients with resectable microsatellite instability–high (MSI-H)/mismatch repair–deficient (dMMR) gastric and gastroesophageal junction adenocarcinoma, dual checkpoint inhibition with ipilimumab and nivolumab given as neoadjuvant therapy led to a pathologic complete response rate of 58.6%,...
As reported in The Lancet by Jong-Mu Sun, MD, of Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, and colleagues, an interim analysis in the phase III KEYNOTE-590 trial has shown that the addition of first-line pembrolizumab to chemotherapy resulted in improved overall and progression-free...
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...
As reported in The Lancet by Yelena Y. Janjigian, MD, of the Gastrointestinal Oncology Service, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and colleagues, the phase III CheckMate 649 trial has shown that the addition of first-line nivolumab to chemotherapy resulted in improved overall and...
The phase II ANCHOR CRC study, the largest prospective study of BRAF inhibitor–based therapy as first-line treatment of metastatic colorectal cancer, has met its primary endpoint, with 47.8% of patients with metastatic colorectal cancer responding to first-line treatment with encorafenib,...
As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Thierry Conroy, MD, and colleagues, the French phase III UNICANCER-PRODIGE 23 trial has shown that intensification of preoperative therapy with FOLFIRINOX (oxaliplatin, irinotecan, leucovorin, fluorouracil [5-FU]) prior to chemoradiotherapy resulted in...
The American Cancer Society (ACS) has named Arif Kamal, MD, MBA, MHS, FACP, FAAHPM, FASCO, as its first Chief Patient Officer to lead its patient support vision and strategic plans to improve the lives of patients with cancer and their families. Based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Dr. Kamal will ...
Raymond N. DuBois, MD, PhD, FAACR, was recently appointed Executive Chairman of the Board of The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research. Dr. DuBois is Director of the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Hollings Cancer Center and Distinguished University Professor at MUSC. As The Mark...
Robert Otto Valdez, PhD, MHSA, was appointed Director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) in February 2022. He was previously the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Professor Emeritus of Family & Community Medicine and Economics at the University of New Mexico (UNM). In...
David R. Penberthy, MD, MBA, was recently named President of the Association of Community Cancer Centers (ACCC) at the organization’s 48th Annual Meeting and Cancer Center Business Summit. Oncology professionals from around the nation gathered at the conference to discuss the convergence of...
Janice Mehnert, MD, was recently named Co-Chair of the ECOG-ACRIN Melanoma Committee, replacing Craig L. Slingluff, MD. Dr. Mehnert is Associate Director for Clinical Research and Director, Melanoma and Cutaneous Medical Oncology at NYU Langone’s Perlmutter Cancer Center. She specializes in both...
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which also awards Nobel Prizes, has announced the winner of the 2022 Sjöberg Prize. Arul Chinnaiyan, MD, PhD, S.P. Hicks Professor of Pathology and Urology at Michigan Medicine, is being honored for the discovery of recurrent gene fusions in prostate cancer....
The Association of Community Cancer Centers (ACCC) announced that Matt Devino, MPH, has joined the organization as Director, Cancer Care Delivery and Health Policy. Mr. Devino will lead the organization’s initiatives to improve cancer care delivery and promote health equity across rural, urban,...