INVITED STUDY discussant Michael J. Overman, MD, Professor of Gastrointestinal Medical Oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, is a co-investigator on CheckMate 142, which led to the approval of another immunotherapy doublet—nivolumab plus ipilimumab—in patients...
IN 2017, ASCO issued its recommendations for addressing the oncology care needs of sexual and gender minority cancer survivors and the unique challenges they face.1 There are myriad reasons for cancer disparities in this population compared to heterosexual cisgender cancer survivors, including...
THERE IS little doubt that the U.S. health-care system is under assault from many directions.1 It is clear that the costs of health management are no longer sustainable, and the United States has one of the highest per capita health costs among the 36 member nations of the Organisation for...
ANDREW X. ZHU, MD, PhD, of Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and Harvard Medical School, noted that Prep-02/ JSAP-05 is the first study to show the value of neoadjuvant chemotherapy in patients with resectable pancreatic adenocarcinoma. However, the findings are applicable only to Asian ...
SEVERAL STUDIES presented at the 2019 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium evaluated the benefits of neoadjuvant treatment in patients with pancreatic cancer—and in patients deemed fully resectable, not just “borderline” resectable.1-3 Although the standard of care for resectable pancreatic ductal...
The results of a recent pilot study suggest that low-dose rituximab provides similar efficacy to standard-dose rituximab for the treatment of acquired thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP), a finding that could point to potential cost savings for patients in the nonlymphoma setting. According...
BOOKMARK Title: Severed Trust: Why American Medicine Hasn’t Been FixedAuthor: George D. Lundberg, MD, With James StaceyPublisher: Basic BooksPublication date: March 2001Price: $28.00, hardcover, 336 pages Pathologist George D. Lundberg, MD, served as Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of the American...
Bacteria may play an important role in whether a woman develops cervical cancer, according to global health research published by scientists from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the Ocean Road Cancer Institute in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in mBio. Part of a growing body of research...
The first symptom of my multiple myeloma appeared 6 months before I received the official diagnosis. I began having some discomfort, not pain exactly, in my right hip, and developed a pronounced limp. I had recently left my medical practice to launch Global Girls Global Women, a nonprofit...
Women diagnosed with breast cancer at age 50 or younger had twice the risk of developing either osteoporosis or osteopenia after adjuvant treatment than did women of the same age who did not have cancer, according to a study led by researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,...
Physician wellness is emblazoned upfront in the news with attention-seeking headlines on a daily basis. The fact that one or two physicians commit suicide every day in this country sometimes elicits more of a sympathetic acknowledgment than a committed call to address it. Moreover, these sobering...
A study published in Nature Medicine found that an artificial intelligence program could distinguish between the histologic diagnosis of adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma.1 Experienced pathologists often struggle to differentiate these tumor types without confirmatory tests. The artificial ...
GUEST EDITOR Dr. Abraham is the Director of the Breast Oncology Program at Taussig Cancer Institute, and Professor of Medicine, Lerner College of Medicine, Cleveland Clinic. In this installment of the Living a Full Life series of articles, guest editor Jame Abraham, MD, FACP, interviewed Norman E. ...
Jason A. Efstathiou, MD, DPhil, of Massachusetts General Hospital, discusses the debate over treating muscle-invasive bladder cancer with radical cystectomy vs trimodality therapy.
A combination of two drugs could become a new standard first-line treatment for patients with metastatic kidney cancer, according to results from the JAVELIN Renal 101 trial presented at the 2019 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium (Abstract 544) and simultaneously published in The New England...
The idea of team-based cancer care most often focuses on involving primary care physicians in the care of cancer survivors, but research has shown patients are also discussing initial cancer treatment options with their primary care doctors. Now, a new study by Wallner et al in Cancer has...
The 2019 Szent-Györgyi Prize for Progress in Cancer Research will be awarded to Steven A. Rosenberg, MD, PhD, of the Center for Cancer Research (CCR) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The prize, awarded annually by the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR), recognizes Dr....
Five years ago, I was living my dream life. I was under contract as a commentator on Fox News, which necessitated commuting weekly from my home in Los Angeles to New York, and was building a new home in Palm Springs with my partner, Matt Lashey. Not only was my career and personal life going well,...
ON JANUARY 22, 2019, 23andMe received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance for a genetic health risk report on the hereditary colorectal cancer syndrome MUTYH-associated polyposis. The clearance follows the FDA’s authorization for 23andMe’s BRCA1/BRCA2 (Selected Variants) Genetic...
Discussions of benefits and harms from screening of high-risk populations for lung cancer have missed the point. The National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) showed an early and statistically significant major benefit in all-cause mortality from computed tomography (CT) screening.1 Those referred for...
The proliferation of immunotherapeutics in the treatment of cancer over the past decade has revolutionized the way many cancers are treated, especially lung cancer and melanoma, as well as some blood cancers, including leukemia and lymphoma, drastically improving outcomes for many patients with...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently granted the following designations and applications and also issued a statement: Priority Review for Pexidartinib in Tenosynovial Giant Cell Tumor The FDA has accepted a new drug application (NDA) and granted Priority Review for pexidartinib...
A study published by Cook et al in JAMA Oncology focused on whether treatment with checkpoint inhibitors is both safe and effective in patients with advanced cancer who are also human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-positive. Because checkpoint inhibitors manipulate the immune system, the concern has...
A research team is using a branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning to better target immunotherapy to those who will benefit. In a recent study published by Leiserson et al in PLOS One, the team used data from a clinical trial of patients with bladder cancer to...
People diagnosed with cancer often say they were stunned when they heard the news of their diagnosis, and were unable to process what their health-care provider said afterward. Give your patients easy-to-understand information they can take home with them. When the Doctor Says “Cancer” is a 1-page...
In discussions after these presentations, several points were made by several experts. To begin, Steven Gore, MD, Director of Hematologic Malignancies at Yale Medical School, called the study of venetoclax plus 10-day decitabine “very important,” but he raised the issue of appropriate dosing. He...
Ravi Vij, MD, Professor of Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, and Saad Usmani, MD, Director of Plasma Cell Disorders at Levine Cancer Institute, Charlotte, North Carolina, spoke to The ASCO Post about the studies presented on chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell...
Partial-breast irradiation delivered over 5 to 10 days did not meet noninferiority criteria compared with whole-breast irradiation given over 5 to 7 weeks, according to 10-year results of the large NRG (NSABP B-39/RTOG 0413) trial presented at the 2018 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.1 However, ...
Pancreaticoduodenectomy, or the Whipple procedure, is one of the most complex abdominal surgeries, and is commonly prescribed as a first line of therapy for cancer located within the pancreatic head. Investigators reported that following a 5-day accelerated recovery pathway after surgery helped to...
World Cancer Day 2019—February 4—highlights the need for urgent action to increase early-stage cancer detection, screening, and diagnosis to significantly improve patients’ chances of survival. Taking place with the theme of “I Am and I Will,” World Cancer...
When added to first-line chemotherapy in patients with untreated metastatic HER2-positive esophageal, gastroesophageal junction, and gastric adenocarcinoma, the combination of pembrolizumab and trastuzumab produced responses in 87% of patients, with 100% of patients experiencing disease control and ...
Injection of a genetically modified virus that induces the body’s own immune cells to attack metastatic melanoma effectively treated almost 40% of patients with tumors that could not be surgically removed, according to findings published by Louie et al in the Journal of the American...
A new report published by Wang et al in JNCCN—Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network found that using Oncotype DX—the most commonly used test for predicting the benefit of adjuvant chemotherapy to reduce the risk of disease recurrence—is not...
In this installment of the Living a Full Life series, guest editor Jame Abraham, MD, interviewed V. Shanta, MD, an internationally renowned oncologist and Chairperson of the Cancer Institute in Adyar, Chennai, India. Dr. Shanta has been with the Institute since 1955, holding several positions...
Peripheral T-cell lymphomas (PTCLs) make up a small fraction of all non-Hodgkin lymphomas—just 15%—in the United States.1 Although rare in the United States, the incidence of PTCL is common across Asia, the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa. Although the reason for such global variation in PTCL is...
THE IMPASSION130 trial—reported in The New England Journal of Medicine by Schmid et al1 and reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post—was an eagerly awaited study in newly diagnosed metastatic triple-negative breast cancer. To briefly review, 902 patients were randomly assigned in a 1:1 fashion to...
THE GEORGIA SOCIETY of Clinical Oncology (GASCO), in partnership with the Medical Association of Georgia, the Georgia Pharmacy Association, and Georgia Watch, worked with the Georgia Office of the Insurance Commissioner to secure what is described as “significant, one-of-a-kind concessions” from...
ADVANCES IN treating breast cancer over the past 20 years have brought us to the point where treatment can be confidently de-escalated for some patients, and immunotherapy and precision decision-making may change the way breast cancer is treated for others, William Gradishar MD, FASCO, told the...
“SURGEONS AND radiation oncologists are obsessed with locoregional recurrence of breast cancer,” Monica Morrow, MD, FASCO, remarked at the 2018 Lynn Sage Breast Cancer Symposium, Chicago. Working to prevent locoregional recurrence, “even if it may not be the major threat to mortality, is...
THE RISK of local recurrence in breast cancer “does not differ substantially based on the operation we perform, but it does differ substantially by subtype,” Tari A. King MD, FACS, stated at the 2018 Lynn Sage Breast Cancer Symposium in Chicago.1 At 10-year follow-up, Dr. King reported, local...
ELIHU H. ESTEY, MD, Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington and Director of Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) Clinical Research at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, added that with these “robust” outcomes, future trial patients may “not be eager to wind up in the...
IN AN OPEN-LABEL phase I study of 153 patients newly diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and mutations in isocitrate dehydrogenase-1 (IDH1) or IDH2, treatment with standard chemotherapy plus the oral IDH inhibitors ivosidenib and enasidenib led to high response rates and possibly impressive ...
JOSEPH MIKHAEL, MD, press conference moderator where these data were discussed, commented on the BEAT AML trial: “One of the greatest challenges in the concept of personalized medicine is that by the time you determine what is right for a patient [ie, genomic analysis], the horse is out of the...
THE MULTIARM, multicollaborative BEAT AML umbrella trial demonstrated the feasibility of using next-generation sequencing to assign treatment tailored to individual genomics of elderly patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) within 7 days. This may prove to be a major advance, since typically...
IT IS TIME for value-based prescribing—the reduction of prescribing costs using basic pharmacologic principles—to be tested and deployed in oncology. The savings are real and there for the taking. If you are concerned about the high costs in cancer care, here is a chance to get maximum value for...
AT THE SAN ANTONIO Breast Cancer Symposium, several breast cancer experts interviewed by The ASCO Post noted that the approved dose of tamoxifen was arbitrarily set, and the optimal dose is actually unknown. Studies of lower-dose tamoxifen, therefore, are welcomed. Virginia G. Kaklamani, MD,...
Forty-six medical advocacy organization and professional societies have called on President Donald Trump, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConell, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to end the government shutdown and, in...
On January 22, 23andMe received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance for a genetic health risk report on MUTYH-associated polyposis, a hereditary colorectal cancer syndrome. The clearance follows the FDA’s authorization for 23andMe’s BRCA1/BRCA2 (Selected Variants)...
John Mendelsohn, MD, President Emeritus of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, died of glioblastoma on January 7, 2019, at his home in Houston at age 82. He was an internationally acclaimed leader in the field of medicine and scientist whose research helped pioneer a new type of...
The oncology community is deeply saddened by the untimely passing of Arti Hurria, MD, FASCO, a nationally regarded expert and advocate for elderly patients with cancer. Dr. Hurria died on November 7, 2018, in a traffic accident. At the time of her tragic death, Dr. Hurria was Director of the City...