The National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded the University of Oklahoma (OU) an expected $2 million over 5 years to develop a program to improve representation of Oklahoma Native American students in biomedical and cancer research. “American Indian...
It is estimated that one in eight men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in his lifetime. The disease is so prevalent, and other than skin cancer, it is the most common cancer diagnosed in American men. According to the American Cancer Society, this year, about 268,490 new cases of prostate...
Endocrine therapy is the foundation of first-line therapy in most patients with hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer. Many of these patients respond to endocrine therapy but eventually become resistant to it through both intrinsic and acquired resistance mechanisms....
September 12, 2022 “President John F. Kennedy’s historic speech that inspired our nation and an entire generation of Americans to achieve manned space exploration underscored the courage and commitment it would take to accomplish this then-audacious goal: ‘We choose to go to the moon in this decade ...
The first 10 participants in the new Leadership Programme for Women in Oncology have been announced. The program, a joint endeavour from ASCO and City Cancer Challenge Foundation (C/Can), seeks to address the specific challenges and barriers faced by women leaders in oncology and strengthen the...
The Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO) and ASCO have released a guideline that appraises the evidence to support incorporating integrative medicine approaches into managing pain in adults with cancer.1 The guideline builds upon existing ASCO guidelines on pain management, the growing body of...
Richter transformation, usually a diffuse large B-cell lymphoma developing in a person with CLL, remains a challenging entity, but novel regimens look promising, as described at the 2022 Pan Pacific Lymphoma Conference by Matthew S. Davids, MD, MMSc, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard...
New research from Yale Cancer Center reveals a higher risk of cancer mortality in incarcerated adults, as well as among those diagnosed with cancer in the first year after release from prison. The findings were published in the journal PLoS One.1 “Cancer is the leading cause of death among people...
To put the CheckMate 914, IMmotion010, and PROSPER trials into context, The ASCO Post spoke with Bernard Escudier, MD, former Chair of the Genitourinary Group of the Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France. In general, Dr. Escudier believes that studies to date are not robust enough to justify...
I continue to be struck by the creativity of medical oncologists. The reimagining of dosing, duration, or regimen composition to respond to patient symptoms or preferences is like a master chef in the kitchen. Although standardization has, with good reason, become the paragon, delivering...
It has been well documented that breast cancer is the most common malignancy in adolescent and young adult (AYA) women aged 15 to 39 years, accounting for 30% of cancers among this population.1 In addition, 5.6% of all invasive breast cancers occur in AYA women.1 A presentation by Rebecca H....
On October 21, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved tremelimumab (Imjudo) in combination with durvalumab (Imfinzi) for the treatment of adult patients with unresectable hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common type of liver cancer. The novel dose and schedule of the...
Treating high-risk, asymptomatic bone metastases with radiation may reduce painful complications and hospitalizations and possibly extend overall survival in people whose cancer has spread to multiple sites, a phase II clinical trial suggests. Results of the multicenter, randomized trial were...
A randomized study has confirmed that patients with high-risk prostate cancer can be treated with 5 vs 8 weeks of radiation therapy. The phase III clinical trial is the first to confirm the safety and efficacy of a moderately shortened course of radiation exclusively for patients with high-risk...
FLASH radiation treatment—which delivers therapeutic doses of radiation in a fraction of a second—may be a potential treatment for tough-to-kill tumors, a first-in-human study in a small number of people with bone cancer suggests. The technology, previously tested in animals, was shown to be as...
Adding stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) to systemic therapy with sorafenib for patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) may extend overall survival and delay tumor progression without compromising patients’ quality of life, findings from the randomized phase III NRG...
An artificial intelligence (AI) model developed by researchers may assist in predicting the likelihood that a patient may have an unplanned hospitalization during radiation treatments for cancer. The machine-learning model uses daily step counts as a proxy to monitor patients’ health as they go...
Xuesong Han, PhD, of the American Cancer Society, discusses findings showing that among newly diagnosed patients with stage IV cancers, Medicaid expansion was associated with increases in receipt of palliative care, although overall usage was low. The increase varied by cancer type. Improving...
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) chose Augusto Ochoa, MD, of Louisiana State University (LSU) Health, as the 2022 recipient of the Harry Hynes Award for Outstanding Contributions to Clinical Trials and Community Research. The award was presented during the NCI Community Oncology Research Program ...
New research confirmed the safety of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines in individuals with cancer who are undergoing immunotherapy, according to a novel study published by Widman et al in JNCCN–Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. The researchers analyzed the frequency of immune-related...
A multicenter analysis of patients with invasive lobular carcinoma—the second most common histologic subtype of invasive breast cancer in the United States—showed that, despite its prevalence, invasive lobular carcinoma was detected later with worse outcomes vs invasive ductal carcinoma and had...
During chemotherapy, physical exercise intervention may be safe, improve long-term cardiorespiratory fitness, and alleviate some of the adverse effects of cancer treatment, according to a novel study published by van der Schoot et al in JACC: CardioOncology. The findings suggested that if exercise...
Individuals who reported using chemical hair-straightening products may be at greater risk for uterine cancer compared to those who did not report using these products, according to a new study published by Chang et al in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI). The researchers found no ...
Female patients with cancer were less satisfied with the quality of their cancer care than male patients with cancer, according to the results of a survey conducted by the Survivor Views program of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network (ACS CAN). In addition, female patients were more...
Samyukta Mullangi, MD, MBA, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, discusses her findings showing that physicians’ prescribing behavior may be influenced by payer-led pathways. Pathway compliance was associated with higher medical costs during a 6-month baseline period but lower health-care...
Regina Barragán-Carrillo, MD, of Mexico’s National Institute of Medical Sciences and Nutrition Salvador Zubirán, discusses her findings showing that currently, physicians have limited knowledge about breast cancer screening in transgender patients. Were this topic addressed with widespread...
Mepitel Film—a silicone-based polyurethane film dressing—may be beneficial in reducing skin toxicities caused by radiation treatment, according to data presented during the October 2022 session of the ASCO Plenary Series by Chow et al (Abstract 390226). Results of the phase III trial showed the...
In a preplanned analysis of the PALLAS trial, the addition of adjuvant palbociclib to standard endocrine therapy did not improve outcomes over endocrine therapy alone in patients with stage IIA breast cancer. Palbociclib offered no additional benefit in terms of invasive disease–free survival (the...
Commercially available noninvasive screening tests for colorectal cancer—the fecal immunochemical test (FIT) and the Cologuard multitarget stool DNA test—are equally effective for screening patients with early-stage colorectal cancer. However, FIT costs about one-fifth of the multitarget stool DNA...
Patients with colorectal cancer who have certain clinical characteristics may benefit from more frequent chest imaging to help identify and target cancer that has metastasized to the lungs, according to a new study presented at the 2022 Scientific Forum of the American College of Surgeons Clinical...
Jensa C. Morris, MD, of the Yale School of Medicine, Smilow Hospitalist Service, discusses her findings on the benefits of hospitalist co-management of patients with cancer: It reduced the length of hospital stay by 1 day, increased early discharge (before 11:00 AM) by threefold; raised the...
Researchers at the Barts Cancer Institute at the Queen Mary University of London, the Italian Institute for Genomic Medicine, and the University of Milan may have identified a novel role for a cancer-causing gene in controlling an important genetic process that underpins genetic variation in...
Researchers have discovered that the organization of different types of immune cells within pancreatic tumors may be associated with how well patients with pancreatic cancer respond to treatment, as well as how long they survive. This information could eventually lead to new ways of treating...
In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month and World Hospice & Palliative Care Day, ASCO and its partners—the International Association for Hospice & Palliative Care; Tómatelo a Pecho, A.C.; the University of Miami Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center and Institute for Advanced Study of the ...
Invited discussant of the MONALEESA-3 trial, Mafalda Oliveira, MD, PhD, of Vall d’Hebron University Hospital and Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, commented: “I totally agree with the authors when they say these results are ‘impressive.’” Among all the phase III trials evaluating...
In an updated analysis of the phase III MONALEESA-3 trial, which included postmenopausal patients with hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative advanced or metastatic breast cancer, first-line treatment with ribociclib plus fulvestrant added nearly 16 months of overall survival time vs fulvestrant...
Debu Tripathy, MD, Professor and Chair of Breast Medical Oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, shared his thoughts on TROPiCS-02 with The ASCO Post. He said the study is important because it addresses the needs of “a population with limited options, whose...
For advanced breast cancer that is hormone receptor–positive and HER2-negative, sacituzumab govitecan-hziy significantly reduced the risk of disease progression by 34% over physician’s choice of treatment, based on the results of the phase III TROPiCS-02 trial.1 The heavily pretreated patients in...
The past year has seen an unprecedented number of practice-changing advances across all three major breast cancer subtypes. For patients with early-stage triple-negative breast cancer, neoadjuvant chemotherapy plus pembrolizumab firmly entered the standard of care based on improvements in...
The final overall survival analysis of the phase III PALOMA-2 trial has shown no significant benefit for palbociclib given with letrozole, vs letrozole and placebo, as a first-line treatment in hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer.1 The results were reported at the 2022 ...
The invited discussant of the TUXEDO-1 trial1 was Mafalda Oliveira, MD, PhD, of Vall d’Hebron University Hospital and Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology, Barcelona. Dr. Oliveira noted that 40% of the 15 patients in TUXEDO-1 had symptomatic disease, and 60% had central nervous system metastases...
Invited discussant Patricia LoRusso, DO, PhD, of Yale School of Medicine, said to the assembled audience at the 2022 ASCO Annual Meeting: “I see you are as excited about these data as I am,” after the applause ended following Dr. Modi’s presentation. “I want to thank our colleagues for helping to...
The antibody-drug conjugate fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki (T-DXd) doubled progression-free survival compared with chemotherapy alone in patients with “HER2-low” metastatic breast cancer—ie, patients with low levels of HER2 expression. The agent also extended overall survival for patients with low ...
The ASCO Post asked Debu Tripathy, MD, Professor and Chair of Medical Breast Oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, and Hope S. Rugo, MD, FASCO, Professor of Medicine, Director of Breast Oncology and Clinical Trials Education at the University of California San...
Preliminary results of the basket BEGONIA trial showed that the antibody-drug conjugate datopotamab deruxtecan (Dato-DXd), paired with the immune checkpoint inhibitor durvalumab, has strong activity in advanced or metastatic triple-negative breast cancer among patients not biomarker-selected for...
Angela DeMichele, MD, MSCE, the Alan and Jill Miller Professor in Breast Cancer Excellence at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, commented on NIMBUS1 for The ASCO Post. She said obtaining information on tumor mutational burden is simple, as it is part ...
Patients with advanced HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer and high tumor mutational burden achieved responses—often durable—from treatment with the immunotherapy doublet of nivolumab and ipilimumab, according to results of the phase II NIMBUS trial reported at the 2021 San Antonio Breast Cancer ...
The OlympiA trial of adjuvant olaparib in patients with HER2-negative, high-risk early-stage breast cancer and BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations has now demonstrated a significant overall survival benefit, reducing the risk of death over placebo by 32% and yielding an absolute improvement of 3.8% at 3...
On this episode, we’re covering two studies that focused on the effects of mortgage discrimination on cancer care outcomes. The research—in colon and lung cancers—was presented during the 2022 ASCO Quality Care Symposium.
Researchers have unmasked mutations in the RNF43 gene as predictive biomarkers of a response to treatment with anti-BRAF/EGFR combination therapy in patients with microsatellite-stable BRAF V600E–mutated metastatic colorectal cancer. Data showed that patients with tumors harboring loss-of-function...