The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) announced that Stanley M. Marks, MD, oncologist and advocate for cancer patients throughout the western Pennsylvania region, is being honored by the UPMC and his medical partners at Oncology Hematology Association (OHA) through the establishment...
The treatment of cancer of the larynx has changed dramatically in recent years. With organ preservation now possible in many cases, it is more important than ever for patients to receive guidance from every corner of the field. In a recent article in the Journal of Oncology Practice (JOP),1 a...
Diethelm Wallwiener, MD, President of the German Society for Gynaecology and Obstetrics, announced “The Big Four of the Millennium” at the 61st Congress of the Society, held recently in Stuttgart, Germany. The award recognizes individuals’ whose work in the 20th century created the standards of...
Members of the oncology community have long complained that prostate cancer lags behind breast cancer regarding biomarkers for prognosis and treatment, but the good news is that this gap is narrowing. In the largest study of its kind to date, presented at the 58th Annual Meeting of the American...
Yanis Boumber, MD, PhD, has joined the Department of Thoracic Medical Oncology and the Molecular Therapeutics Program at Fox Chase Cancer Center. Dr. Boumber first joined Fox Chase’s Department of Medical Oncology in 2013 and now returns to Fox Chase from the University of New Mexico Comprehensive ...
Philippe Rochigneux, MD, of the Paoli Calmettes Institute, Marseille Cancer Center, discusses in French his findings on the high rates of chemotherapy used at the end of life for metastatic solid cancer, especially in young patients treated in high-volume centers without a palliative care unit....
Philippe Rochigneux, MD, of the Paoli Calmettes Institute, Marseille Cancer Center, discusses his findings on the high rates of chemotherapy used at the end of life for metastatic solid cancer, especially in young patients treated in high-volume centers without a palliative care unit. (Abstract...
The University of Colorado Cancer Center has named Eric Clambey, PhD, Director of the Flow Cytometry Shared Resource. Dr. Clambey, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology, is excited to assume his new role in a vital resource for the cancer center. “My research focuses on the...
We pass them every day on our way to the hospital, the street dwellers of our town in India. Their home consists of a plastic sheet suspended between four poles on the pavement. One day, two women sat under the plastic sheet in happy conversation. It had rained heavily the previous night, and I...
Paul Jacobsen, PhD, has been named Associate Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Division of Cancer Control and Population Science’s Healthcare Delivery Research Program. In this position, he will be leading a team at the NCI whose mission is to serve as a catalyst for the field of...
Mr. C is almost 90 now, but every summer the boxes of squash, pumpkins, tomatoes, and other vegetables from his truck farm still arrive like clockwork at our door. The cancer that required treatment 17 years ago has never recurred. He’s now struggling with a new problem, recovering from a broken...
Radiologic Associates of Fredericksburg (RAF) has announced that Samer Hijaz, MD, a fellowship-trained interventional radiologist, has joined the practice. The interventional radiologists and vascular surgeons of the RAF serve patients at Virginia Interventional and Vascular Associates, the...
Last month, ASCO recommended to Vice President Joe Biden several immediate and practical actions the Cancer Moonshot Initiative could take during the remainder of his term in the White House—steps that could make a lasting impact in the effort to discover new cancer treatments. ASCO’s...
Bruce E. Johnson, MD, FASCO, began his term as ASCO President-Elect in June 2016 and will serve as 2017–2018 President. A thoracic cancer specialist, Dr. Johnson is Chief Clinical Research Officer and institute physician at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical...
On July 1, 2016, Bishoy Faltas, MD, joined the Genitourinary Oncology Program in the Division of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Weill Cornell Medicine. As a laboratory-based physician-scientist, Dr. Faltas will focus on studying mechanisms of mutagenesis and drug resistance in bladder...
Eric Fearon, MD, PhD, has been named Director of the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Fearon, the Emanuel N. Maisel Professor of Oncology at the University of Michigan, is a nationally recognized investigator in cancer genetics. His research has led to a greater...
When it comes to cancer-causing viruses like human papillomavirus (HPV), researchers are continuing to find that infection with one strain may be better than another. In an analysis of survival data for patients with oropharyngeal cancer, researchers from the University of North Carolina (UNC)...
John Karanicolas, PhD, has joined the Fox Chase Cancer Center as Associate Professor in the Molecular Therapeutics Program. Dr. Karanicolas, a computational chemist, earned his doctorate from the Scripps Research Institute. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington....
Friends of Cancer Research (Friends) celebrated its 20th anniversary September 21 at a special event in Washington, DC. The event honored Janet Woodcock, MD; Eric Lander, PhD; and Sean Parker. Dr. Woodcock, Director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) at the U.S. Food and Drug...
Three years ago, IBM’s Watson supercomputer was best known for defeating two former champions on the TV game show Jeopardy! Today, it is grabbing headlines for becoming an important assistant in cancer care. Able to read and understand millions of pages of text within seconds, Watson caught the...
The Endocrine Society selected 14 leaders in the endocrinology field as winners of the organization’s prestigious 2017 Laureate Awards. Established in 1944, the Laureate Awards recognize the highest achievements in the endocrinology field. Three oncology leaders in particular were recognized for...
An international leader in harnessing a patient’s own stem cells to fight cancer and autoimmune diseases joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin (UW) Carbone Cancer Center on September 1. Jacques Galipeau, MD, FRCP(C), came from the Winship Cancer Center at Emory University, where he...
In the 20th century, the field of statistics developed and was gradually applied to clinical research. The use of statistics allows clinical researchers to form reasonable and accurate inferences from collected information and to make sound decisions in the presence of uncertainty. Moreover,...
Clinicians and researchers in the field of palliative and supportive care are enjoying the recognition the field is now receiving and expecting the future to be ripe with opportunity. But one thought leader in this specialty had a suggestion for attendees at the 2016 Palliative Care in Oncology...
This past summer, Eric S. Lander, PhD, President of the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, raised a few eyebrows at the Aspen Ideas Festival when he...
The third annual Palliative Care in Oncology Symposium, held on September 9–10, 2016, in San Francisco, California, brought together more than 650 attendees from multiple countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and China. It featured over 250 study...
ASCO presented Representative Michael Burgess, MD (TX-26) with its first-ever ASCO Congressional Leadership Award on September 21 to recognize his steadfast work to support policies related to cancer research and treatment. This new, annual award honors a member of Congress who is a consistent...
The ProtecT trial showing similar 10-year survival with active monitoring, surgery, or radiotherapy for prostate-specific antigen (PSA)-detected localized prostate cancer but a greater risk of disease progression/metastasis with monitoring was recently reported by Hamdy and colleagues and is...
Thomas J. Lynch, Jr, MD, of Massachusetts General Hospital, summarizes his keynote lecture on whether we are any closer to curing lung cancer with targeted treatments. (Keynote Address 2)
Bradley R. Prestidge, MD, of Bon Secours VA Health System, summarizes his plenary lecture on this phase III trial comparing combined external beam radiation and transperineal interstitial permanent brachytherapy with brachytherapy alone for selected patients with intermediate-risk prostate cancer....
Brian Kavanagh, MD, MPH, of the University of Colorado at Denver and ASTRO’s incoming President, discuss his goals for the Society in 2017.
In a new study, men who underwent vasectomy did not have an increased risk of prostate cancer, nor were they more likely to die from prostate cancer than men who did not receive this procedure. According to the researchers, this is the largest prospective study of vasectomy and fatal prostate...
Saul J. Sharkis, PhD, a scientist who studied the biology of blood stem cells and how they could be used to treat cancer through bone marrow transplantation, died on September 4. He was 72. Dr. Sharkis was Professor of Oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a faculty...
In 2008, Roger Y. Tsien, PhD, shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Drs. Osamu Shimomura and Martin Chalfie for helping turn green fluorescent protein from a jellyfish into a research tool that could tag cancer cells or track the advance of Alzheimer’s disease. “Our work is often described as...
For over 2,500 years, bloodletting was the backbone of medical therapy. To date, it is the longest-running therapeutic tradition known. First practiced in ancient Egypt, its use spread throughout Western civilization. The therapy was still performed in Southern rural America until the 1910s. One...
Inova Health System is pleased to welcome Michael Maitland, MD, PhD, where he will serve as the new Director of Therapeutics for the Inova Center for Personalized Health and as Associate Director of Cancer Therapeutics for the Inova Schar Cancer Institute. Dr. Maitland comes to Inova from the...
There have been numerous books explicating the information a physician or patient needs to know about our current clinical state in the diagnosis and treatment of ovarian cancer. Many of them are good, but rare is a well-written book in the cancer genre that offers solid scientific hope exceeding ...
The Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group–American College of Radiology Imaging Network (ECOG-ACRIN) Cancer Research Group has received federal approval to add a quality-of-life research study, Communication and Education in Tumor Profiling (EAQ152), or COMET, to the NCI-MATCH (EAY131) trial, which is ...
On August 13, 2013, more than 100 cancer researchers and physicians from around the world met in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, to discuss 2 challenging problem areas in cancer. One group was focused on the carcinogenic potential of low-dose exposure to chemical mixtures in the environment, and the...
Over the past couple of decades, chemoradiation for several cancers, such as lung and breast, has advanced in efficacy and side-effect tolerance, prolonging survival and quality of life for patients. One of the pioneers in chemoradiation, Robert B. Livingston, MD, died on September 8, 2016. Dr....
Studies show that adolescent and young adult cancer survivors experience distinct challenges and quality-of-life issues from those experienced by either younger or older adult cancer survivors and that those challenges and issues can persist long after the cancer diagnosis and the end of...
This summer, ASCO continued its active involvement in Vice President Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot Initiative. ASCO joined the Vice President at the formal launch of the moonshot earlier this year, and since then, has discussed research and policy proposals to advance discovery in cancer treatment...
A new study1 showing that just 1 in 20 terminally ill patients with cancer has sufficient understanding about the prognosis or purpose of treatment is highlighting the need for improvements in both the way oncologists communicate prognosis with their patients and in the development of educational...
A recent study1 published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (see “Breaking the ‘Conspiracy of Silence’” in this issue of The ASCO Post) found that just 1 in 20 patients with advanced, incurable cancer has sufficient understanding of his or her prognosis or life expectancy. Now, another new study ...
Cervical cancer incidence and mortality rates—perhaps more than any other chronic disease—shine a grim spotlight on global disparities of care. It is one of the most preventable of human malignancies, yet it is the leading cause of cancer deaths in women around the world. It kills 260,000 women...
With the expansion of our understanding of signaling pathways in normal cells and how they are co-opted or corrupted in malignancy, the number of potential antitumor agents to be tested has exploded, exposing the limitations of traditional antineoplastic drug development and challenging us to...
The Basser Center for BRCA at Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center has announced the recipient of the 2016 Basser Global Prize is cancer geneticist Steven Narod, MD, FRCPC, PhD (hon), FRSC, Director of the Familial Breast Cancer Research Unit and a senior scientist at the Women’s College Hospital in...
Clinicians face a number of questions in evaluating and treating patients with stage IIIA non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). One expert in the field, Rafael Santana-Davila, MD, reviewed key issues in managing this disease in the Journal of Oncology Practice (JOP). The ASCO Post asked Dr....
The American Society of Hematology (ASH) will present the 2016 William Dameshek Prize to Charles Mullighan, MBBS (Hons), MD, of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, for his leadership in defining the landscape of genetic alterations of acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), which has provided...
The Chinese Journal of Cancer (CJC) is soliciting the 150 most important questions in cancer research and clinical oncology from cancer researchers around the world. The editors of CJC believe this will help provide important insights and guidance in future efforts to advance cancer research...