In an accompanying editorial,1 Karla Kerlikowske, MD, of the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues point out that while the finding of Killelea et al that digital mammography screening was not associated with downstaging of disease may not be surprising, given the similar accuracy ...
In March, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) transformed its Cooperative Group Program into the National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN). Spurred by recommendations in the Institute of Medicine (IOM) 2010 report, A National Cancer Clinical Trials System for the 21st Century: Reinvigorating the NCI...
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, has launched initial human testing of an investigational vaccine to prevent Ebola virus disease, according to a news release issued by NIH. The early-stage trial has begun initial human...
Although a do-not-resuscitate (DNR) order does not mean “do not treat,” that is how it is often interpreted, according to a study examining the level of care oncology inpatients at a tertiary care hospital received.1 The study found that the interpretation of DNR orders among oncology nurses and...
The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation has awarded a $450,000 grant to an investigator studying T cells at City of Hope in Duarte. Elizabeth Budde, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Hematology & Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation at City of Hope, Duarte, received The Jake...
The recent publication by Antoniou et al on risk of breast cancer in PALB2 carriers,1 reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post (page 47), is a contribution to the interesting history of the PALB2 gene, and an important milestone in the expansion of hereditary cancer susceptibility testing in the...
The updated results of the European Randomised Study of Screening for Prostate Cancer (ERSPC)—reported in The Lancet by Fritz H. Schröder, MD, of Erasmus University Medical Center, and colleagues1 and reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post—show a continued decline, as predicted,2 in the number...
The three leukemia/lymphoma studies selected from the many 2014 ASCO Annual Meeting abstracts for presentation at the recent Best of ASCO meeting in Chicago “are really paradigm-shifting,” noted Lucy A. Godley, MD, PhD, of the University of Chicago. These studies, she said, “give great promise for...
Precision medicine in the management of ovarian cancer “is a work in progress, to be sure,” Steven B. Newman, MD, noted in wrapping up the session on gynecologic cancer at the recent Best of ASCO meeting in Chicago. “A list of different histologic types of ovarian cancer and potential targets are...
Inhibitors of heat shock protein 90 (Hsp90) look promising for the treatment of advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and have the advantage of not needing a specific mutation to target, said Suresh S. Ramalingam, MD, Professor and Chief of Medical Oncology at the Winship Cancer Institute of...
Oncologists love jargon—a language peculiar to a particular trade, profession, or group that facilitates communication among members. Our day-to-day communications, medical notes, and journal reports are filled with this type of jargon. Other definitions of jargon are less flattering, including...
1. Chemotherapy Cures Advanced Hodgkin Lymphoma In the first chemotherapy breakthrough for advanced cancer in adults, a four-drug combination chemotherapy regimen, called MOPP (mustargen/oncovin/procarbazine/prednisone), induced long-term remissions in over half of patients with aggressive Hodgkin ...
Last month, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) released its 2014 Cancer Progress Report: Transforming Lives Through Research, which highlights the quickening pace of drug development and approval, especially in molecularly targeted agents, that are leading to increased numbers of...
Despite a diagnosis in August 2013 of stage III high-grade spindle cell sarcoma and subsequent disease recurrence, I’m mindful of how fortunate I am that my cancer was found before widespread metastases could take hold, making treatment futile. It was just happenstance, 2 months before, on a long...
Several faculty members at Roswell Park Cancer Institute have been awarded nearly $5 million in grant funding from public and private organizations to further their efforts to find new and better ways to detect and treat cancer and improve patients’ quality of life. The 13 awards, including two for ...
Bookmark Title: Integrative Oncology (Second Edition)Editors: Donald I. Abrams, MD, and Andrew T. Weil, MDPublisher: Oxford University PressPublication date: September 3, 2014Price: $65.00; Paperback, 848 pages In 1990, David Eisenberg, MD, from the Harvard School of Public Health, conducted a...
The information contained in this Clinical Trials Resource Guide includes actively recruiting clinical studies for people with breast cancer. The studies include phase I and II, interventional, and observational trials evaluating new therapies; diagnostic tools; genetic counseling; the association ...
Parents of twins often tell them apart through subtle differences such as facial expression, moles, voice tone, and gait. Similarly, physicians treating women with endometrial cancer must be able to distinguish between different versions of this disease form that, on the surface, appear the same....
In his powerful 2010 best-seller, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner), Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, chronicles the evolution of cancer from the oldest known description of the disease written on a papyrus from about 1600 BC to the present day’s understanding of the biology of ...
Eleven days before Patricia J. Goldsmith, joined CancerCare as its CEO last May, she received the unexpected news that she had early-stage colorectal cancer. While the diagnosis was shocking, Ms. Goldsmith said it gave her a unique perspective on what it means to have this serious disease and a...
Earlier this year the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an agency of the World Health Organization, launched a World Cancer Report 2014. The report, a collaboration of over 250 leading scientists from more than 40 countries, described multiple aspects of cancer research and...
In 1974, First Lady Betty Ford spoke publicly about her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. Remarkably, at the time of her action, public discussion of breast cancer in the United States was seen as off limits. Four decades later, cultural barriers to women’s health still exist, particularly in...
In 2014, about 15,000 people in the United States will be diagnosed with some form of sarcoma, and of those, approximately 5,000 adults and children are expected to die of the disease. Sarcomas are a heterogeneous group of mesenchymal malignancies that have historically been difficult to diagnose...
Oncology fellows just years away from entering the profession full time may have unrealistic expectations of their future career, according to data published recently in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The study by Tait D. Shanafelt, MD, of the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, and colleagues...
Each day, millions of patients with cancer around the world suffer unrelieved pain because they are denied morphine, the gold standard of cancer pain control. The World Health Organization has called access to morphine a human rights issue. Not surprisingly, the crisis in unrelieved cancer pain is...
For patients with cancer who already have compromised immune systems, what may seem like a minor medical issue—ie, fever, dehydration, viral infection—can rapidly escalate into an emergency situation requiring care from a medical team familiar with managing the side effects of cancer treatment....
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has released a large set of data about the payments physicians and teaching hospitals received from pharmaceutical and medical device companies from August 1 to December 31, 2013. This public disclosure, mandated under a provision of the...
Fifteen years ago, David Fishman, MD, launched the National Ovarian Cancer Early Detection Program as part of the National Cancer Institute’s Early Detection Research Network. The goal of the research effort was to develop methods to accurately detect ovarian cancer while it was still confined to...
The goal of clinical, translational, and basic research is, in the end, the betterment of life on earth. Advances in basic and clinical science ultimately should lead to information that, in turn, enables clinicians to make better treatment decisions for individual patients in order to improve...
The investigators and sponsors of the phase III REVEL trial should be congratulated and probably commiserated. In this large study, reported by Garon and colleagues in The Lancet and reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post, 1,253 patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) were...
Two-thirds of patients with advanced pancreatic adenocarcinoma who harbored BRCA mutations responded to the combination of veliparib, cisplatin, and gemcitabine in a phase IB trial that is paving the way for future studies of novel poly(ADP-ribose) polymerases (PARP) inhibitors in this challenging...
Determining an appropriate course of androgen-deprivation therapy in patients with prostate cancer is complex. For patients with high-risk features, 4 to 6 months of androgen-deprivation therapy helps, but 28 to 36 months is better in terms of disease control and overall survival. In the study by...
The door is open for expanded use of stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) in patients with inoperable early-stage lung cancer and for patients with oligometastatic stage IV non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), according to results of two studies presented at the 56th Annual Meeting of the...
Value-based health-care reform is happening. We have to get on board,” Rena Conti, PhD, a health economist at the University of Chicago, advised attendees of the Best of ASCO Seattle meeting. She discussed highlights from Annual Meeting sessions that addressed the impact of the Affordable Care Act...
For a year before I was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) in December 2011, I had what I thought were the lingering remnants of a bad case of bronchitis. My breathing was labored, I had a chronic cough, and occasionally my voice would give out. Every time I saw my pulmonologist, I would...
BOOKMARK Title: Therapeutic Revolution: The History of Medical Oncology From Early Days to the Creation of the SubspecialtyAuthor: Pierre R. BandPublisher: Bentham SciencePublication date: 2014Price: $39.00 (eBook); $78.00 (print on demand); 213 pagesAvailable at: eurekaselect.com According to...
The information contained in this Clinical Trials Resource Guide includes actively recruiting clinical studies of people with lung neoplasms, including stage I and II small cell and non–small cell lung cancers. The studies include phase Ib, II, III, observational, and interventional trials...
Testicular cancer is one of oncology’s true success stories. It is a highly treatable disease, usually curable, that most often develops in young and middle-aged men. Despite the success in testicular cancer, there are still clinical challenges ranging from staging to optimum therapeutic...
The Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO has received a major commitment of support for the development of CancerLinQ™ from Cancer Treatment Centers of America, Inc (CTCA), a national network of five cancer hospitals. The donation is the largest received to date in support of CancerLinQ, a...
The formal discussant of the study presented by James et al at the ESMO 2014 Congress was Bertrand Tombal, MD, PhD, Chairman of the Division of Urology and Associated Professor of Physiology at Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels. He praised the STAMPEDE trial as “wonderful, because it...
Regarding this confirmatory analysis presented by Ryan et al at the ESMO 2014 Congress, formal discussant Bertrand Tombal, MD, PhD, Chairman of the Division of Urology and Associated Professor of Physiology at Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, said, “COU-AA-302 profoundly impacted the way ...
The study was well performed and was a good representative sample of patients with cachexia,” said formal discussant Florian Scotté, MD, PhD, a medical oncologist in the Department of Oncology at the Georges Pompidou European Hospital, Paris, regarding the study presented by Temel et al at the ESMO ...
A record number of 19,859 attendees at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2014 Congress discussed changes to oncology that will soon have a positive impact on the care of patients around the world. “We are particularly pleased to see participants from 131 countries at the congress...
Progress has recently been swift in the development of new drugs to improve the response to hormone therapy in breast cancer, according to Hope S. Rugo, MD, Professor of Medicine and Director of Breast Oncology and Clinical Trials Education at the University of California, San Francisco, Helen...
Last fall, Richard R. Barakat, MD, FACS, the Ronald O. Perelman Chair in Gynecologic Surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, was named to the new position of Deputy Physician-in-Chief for the Memorial Sloan Kettering Regional Care Network and Cancer Alliance, a new initiative meant to...
Recent discoveries in biology, therapy, and (most importantly) the interplay between these two have led to groundbreaking advances in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). These advances underline the impact of the “translational” approach to cancer management in general. Standard of Care...
The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded with one half to John O’Keefe, PhD, of University College London, and the second half jointly awarded to May-Britt Moser, PhD, and Edvard I. Moser, PhD, of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, for their...
"Impressive,” “outstanding,” and “unprecedented” are among the terms used to describe the 56.5-month overall survival for women with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer receiving first-line treatment with pertuzumab (Perjeta) in combination with trastuzumab (Herceptin) and docetaxel in the...
The following essay by Julie Vose, MD, MBA, FASCO, is adapted from The Big Casino: America’s Best Cancer Doctors Share Their Most Powerful Stories (May 2014), coedited by Stan Winokur, MD, and Vincent Coppola. The book is available on Amazon.com and thebigcasino.org. When I met Cindy, she was...
BOOKMARK Title: Shrinkage: Manhood, Marriage, and the Tumor That Tried to Kill MeAuthor: Bryan BishopPublisher: Thomas Dunne BooksPublication date: April 29, 2014Price: $25.99; hardcover, 336 pages At 30 years old, Bryan Bishop was having the time of his life. Known to millions of radio fans as...