In this installment of the Living a Full Life series, guest editor Jame Abraham, MD, FACP, spoke with bone marrow transplant expert Mammen Chandy, MD, FRACP, FRACPA, Director of Tata Medical Center, in Kolkata, India. Dr. Chandy was instrumental in establishing the first sustained bone marrow...
In a single-institution study reported in the journal Cancer, and reviewed in the September 10, 2021, issue of The ASCO Post, Bei Hu, MD, and colleagues from Levine Cancer Institute/Atrium Health found that the use of a dedicated nurse navigation program aided in producing similar patterns of...
Our goal with this review of the pivotal years of oncology in Europe is to acknowledge the tremendous contributions of the early leaders in the field and to help young investigators learn from the past to better cope with the inevitable challenges of today and tomorrow. “On ne connaît pas...
On November 4, 2021, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued an interim final rule requiring COVID-19 vaccination of eligible staff at health-care facilities that participate in the Medicare and Medicaid programs, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)...
ASCO has released new recommendations for the management of adverse events related to two immunotherapy modalities with increasing application in cancer care—immune checkpoint inhibitors and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy. The recommendations were published as two separate...
Among patients with hormone receptor–positive breast cancer treated with an aromatase inhibitor plus palbociclib, those who displayed a rising ESR1 mutation detected in their blood before disease progression doubled their median progression-free survival following a switch to fulvestrant plus...
On October 15, 2021, atezolizumab was approved for adjuvant treatment following resection and platinum-based chemotherapy in patients with stage II to IIIA non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with PD-L1 expression on ≥ 1% of tumor cells, as determined by a U.S. Food and Drug Administration...
Recent articles in JAMA Oncology focused on lung cancer and screening strategies. Apar Kishor Ganti, MD, MS, of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, and colleagues provided updated data on non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) incidence, prevalence, and stage through 2017.1 Sylvia K....
In a study reported in JAMA Oncology, Mehtsun et al found patterns of increasing use of adjuvant chemotherapy over time among patients aged ≥ 80 years undergoing pancreaticoduodenectomy for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. In addition, they found that use of adjuvant chemotherapy was associated...
On November 17, 2021, the immunotherapeutic agent pembrolizumab was granted approval for adjuvant treatment of patients with renal cell carcinoma at intermediate-high or high risk of recurrence following nephrectomy or nephrectomy and resection of metastatic lesions.1 Supporting Efficacy Data...
Lung health in adults has traditionally been defined as the absence of disease, but it may be time to rethink this paradigm, according to Ravi Kalhan, MD, MS, Director of the Northwestern Asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Program at Northwestern University Feinberg School of...
Recent advances in medical imaging have led to more accurate detection and management of early thoracic diseases such as lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and cardiovascular disease—three of the top four leading causes of death in the United States. Unfortunately, if not...
“It’s becoming more and more clear that increasing the cytotoxic effect of treatment and expecting to get a better outcome is an approach of the past,” said Nabil F. Saba, MD, FACP, the Lynne and Howard Halpern Chair in Head and Neck Cancer Research, Professor and Vice Chair ofHematology and...
In the treatment of patients with human papillomavirus (HPV)-related oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma, neither cancer outcomes nor measurable quality of life have yet been shown to differ between surgery- and radiotherapy-based approaches, according to Sue S. Yom, MD, PhD, FASTRO, Professor of ...
Michaela Gack, PhD, Scientific Director of Cleveland Clinic’s Florida Research and Innovation Center, has received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Pioneer Award to support her research toward the development of broad-spectrum antiviral drugs. The grant is part of NIH’s High-Risk,...
“Immunotherapy is now the standard of care in the recurrent metastatic setting,” said Nabil F. Saba, MD, FACP, Director of Head and Neck Oncology at Emory University and a specialist in immunotherapy for head and neck cancer. “However, we’re still struggling with the question of which immunotherapy ...
The management of recurrent and/or metastatic head and neck cancer is complex. Historically, patients with squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck with local or regional recurrence were considered for salvage surgery or reirradiation (in high-volume centers or centers of expertise), with an...
The 2021 Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University Symposium: Updates in the Management of Head and Neck Cancer explored current paradigms for the multidisciplinary treatment of head and neck cancer.1 Moderated by Nabil F. Saba, MD, FACP, the Lynne and Howard Halpern Chair in Head and Neck...
Guest Editor’s Note: With the easing of some COVID-19 restrictions, the Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO) held its 2021 international conference in a hybrid format. It focused on the science of living well with cancer, challenges in designing integrative oncology research, and the role of...
Advances intreating breast cancer “increasingly create opportunities to consider where radiation therapy might safely be omitted,” Reshma Jagsi, MD, DPhil, told participants at the 2021 Lynn Sage Breast Cancer Symposium.1 “But, I would encourage us,” she continued, “not to assume that women who...
For many, the way things are when you learn about them is assumed to be the way things have always been. For example, antibiotics are wonderful—but if you were practicing medicine when penicillin was discovered, it would have seemed like a miracle. For most of us, there have always been chemical...
Although enormous progress over the past 50 years in every aspect of cancer care, including prevention, screening, chemotherapy, targeted therapy, surgery, radiation therapy, and supportive care, has resulted in increases in lives saved—from 3 million in 1971 to 16.9 million in 2019—the burden of...
A next-generation technology that allows the study of protein expression at the single-cell level and the location of the cells within the tumor microenvironment was feasible and provided information on the benefit of adding the immune checkpoint inhibitor atezolizumab to chemotherapy as...
Investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine have identified significant differences in the molecular characteristics of tumors from younger and older patients with cancer across several cancer types. Their research, published by Shah et al in Cell Reports, suggests that cancer treatment could...
The use of multigene sequencing and SNP array as a therapeutic decision tool improved the outcomes of patients with metastatic breast cancer if the patients carried alterations classified in the I/II tiers of the ESMO Scale for Clinical Actionability of Molecular Targets (ESCAT), according to...
Data analysis from the I-SPY2 clinical trial found that among women with high-risk breast cancer, race did not significantly affect several key measures of breast cancer treatment outcomes, including pathologic complete response (pCR) and event-free survival. The study, which is being presented by...
Adam M. Brufsky, MD, PhD, Professor of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Co-Director of the Comprehensive Breast Cancer Center, commented on the KEYNOTE-355 final analysis1 for The ASCO Post. “We now have a drug with full approval of the U.S. Food and Drug...
The final overall survival results from the KEYNOTE-355 study showed a statistically significant 27% reduction in the risk of death for patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer whose tumors were strongly positive for PD-L1, defined as a combined positive score (CPS) of at least 10 and ...
Patients with multiple myeloma lacking an antibody response to COVID-19 vaccination may also fail to mount a T-cell response, researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have reported. This scenario seemed to be most common among patients actively treated with anti-CD38 and...
Next-generation sequencing of bone marrow samples from pediatric and young adult patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) treated with tisagenlecleucel was more accurate in predicting relapse than flow cytometry and monitoring of B-cell aplasia, according to the results from a study by...
Advances in treating breast cancer “increasingly create opportunities to consider where radiation therapy might safely be omitted,” Reshma Jagsi, MD, DPhil, told participants at the 2021 Lynn Sage Breast Cancer Symposium.1 “But, I would encourage us,” she continued, “not to assume that women who...
Invited discussant of the phase III DREAMseq trial, Keith T. Flaherty, MD, said the findings still leave room for nuanced decision-making.1 Dr. Flaherty is Professor of Medicine at Harvard and Director of the Henri and Belinda Termeer Center for Targeted Therapy at the Massachusetts General...
In the treatment of patients with advanced melanoma containing BRAF mutations, initial treatment with an immunotherapy combination achieved superior overall survival compared with targeted therapy in the phase III DREAMseq trial, also known as the ECOG-ACRIN EA6134 trial. The results were reported ...
Significant decreases in computed tomography (CT) imaging for cancer persisted even after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020—delaying diagnosis and treatment and raising the possibility of more advanced cancers and poorer outcomes for patients, according to a study presented at the...
The invited discussant of monarchE,1 Aditya Bardia, MD, MPH, Director, Breast Cancer Research, and Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, commented: “Based on a hazard ratio of 0.69 for invasive disease–free survival, the results are statistically significant and clinically...
Longer-term follow-up of the global phase III monarchE trial showed an increasing benefit for adding abemaciclib to endocrine therapy in the adjuvant treatment of early high-risk hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative breast cancer, regardless of Ki67 index. The latest findings were reported at a ...
Charles L. Shapiro, MD, Professor of Medicine, Hematology and Medical Oncology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, commented on the findings of the coopERA trial for The ASCO Post. He maintained that the oral selective estrogen receptor degraders now in development will be a...
Moles and melanomas both originate from the same type of cell—melanocytes. A study published by McNeal et al in eLife Magazine aimed to explain how common moles and melanomas form and why moles can subsequently change into melanoma. Melanocytes are cells that give color to the skin to protect it...
Nearly 20 million people around the world were diagnosed with cancer in 2020, with 10 million losing their lives to this devastating disease. We highlight here the salient points from our article published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians,1 which describes the major themes and...
In a prospective cohort study (CEASAR) reported in JAMA Oncology, Wallis et al found that patient expectations of treatment efficacy and adverse effects were associated with treatment-related regret at 5 years after diagnosis in men with localized prostate cancer. As stated by the investigators,...
There are currently more than 3.8 million breast cancer survivors living in the United States, and 3 out of 10 women with invasive breast cancer will develop metastases. However, if some breast cancer cells remain after treatment, the amount is often too small to be detected by mammograms or...
In a single-institution study reported in Cancer, Bei Hu, MD, of the Department of Hematologic Oncology and Blood Disorders, Levine Cancer Institute/Atrium Health in Charlotte, and colleagues found that use of a dedicated nurse navigation program contributed to redressing the recognized inequities...
The ASCO Post’s Integrative Oncology series is intended to facilitate the availability of evidence-based information on integrative and complementary therapies sometimes used by patients with cancer. In this installment, Ting Bao, MD, DABMA, MS, and Jyothirmai Gubili, MS, focus on shiitake mushroom ...
In this installment of the Living a Full Life series, guest editor Jame Abraham, MD, spoke with Masakazu Toi, MD, PhD, a clinical breast cancer expert who is keen on research that translates basic science into clinical study. He is involved in various innovative research projects on the development ...
Bortezomib, thalidomide, and dexamethasone (VTd) is an acceptable, effective standard-of-care induction treatment in Europe for patients with newly diagnosed myeloma who are eligible for autologous stem cell transplantation. CASSIOPEIA is a two-part, open-label, randomized, phase III trial in...
Tools that make it easier for patients to access care and for their physicians to monitor their health status have also emerged with the advent of digital resources. In the closing panel of the NCCN Policy Summit, participants described tools developed by their own organizations to improve quality...
Artificial intelligence, digital therapeutics, telehealth, biometric monitoring: the terms alone are enough to suggest that cancer care is entering a new age, one characterized by tools and practices based on technologic innovation. To explore the impact of these new tools, the National...
National surveys consistently show that spirituality and religion are important components in the lives of most Americans, with more than 90% of adults expressing a belief in God and more than 70% identifying religion as one of the most important influences in their lives.1 Studies also show that...
On November 2, 2021, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released the 2022 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) and Quality Payment Program (QPP) final rule. Although ASCO will analyze the rule in greater detail in the coming days, initial highlights from the rule are outlined...
A recent study published in JCO Oncology Practice found that patients with certain cancers have a higher mortality risk than those with other cancer types if they have contracted the novel coronavirus (SARS–CoV-2).1 Specifically, older patients with B-cell malignancies who acquire SARS–CoV-2 who...