In 1980, Paul G. Marks, MD, became the President and Chief Executive Officer of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), the oldest and largest private cancer center in the world. Over his 19-year reign, he is credited with setting MSK on a more scientific course by encouraging innovative...
Most who leave a mark in life are noted for a single contribution; few are remembered for the breadth of their contributions. Such a man was John W. Yarbro, MD, PhD, who, near the end of his rich life, stepped foot on Antarctica, completing his desire to have visited all of the world’s seven...
Rosemary Yancik, PhD, a medical sociologist, was best known for her talent of bringing a group of experts together who shared her interests in improving the prevention and management of cancer in elderly patients. She served many years at the National Institutes of Health in both the National...
Insomnia is a persistent sleep disorder that affects nearly 60% of people with cancer, diminishing their quality of life.1,2 Chronic insomnia disorder is defined by trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking too early three times per week for 3 months or more.3 Standard care comprises...
Reports suggest that the severity of coronavirus infection may be significantly more pronounced in men than in women.1 Studies have demonstrated that estrogen reduces both influenza virus replication in human female nasal epithelial cells2 and moderates the cytokine storm in murine models of this...
As part of a series of interviews with cancer experts during the COVID-19 pandemic, The ASCO Post spoke with Hagop Kantarjian, MD, Professor and Chair of the Department of Leukemia at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, about the impact of the pandemic on treatment of...
In recognition of Melanoma Awareness Month, the Melanoma Research Alliance has announced funding for 26 research awards, totaling $10.9 million. These grant awards are made possible through the significant contributions of individuals, families, institutions, and corporate allies. The 26 awards...
The management of pediatric brain and spinal cord tumors is extremely complex, as are the survivorship issues in this highly vulnerable patient population. To shed light on the current clinical reality in this setting, The ASCO Post recently spoke with Katherine E. Warren, MD, an internationally...
In this edition of the Living a Full Life series, guest editor Jame Abraham, MD, FACP, spoke with John Craig Venter, PhD, Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of the J. Craig Venter Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to human, microbial, and environmental genomic research. A...
In 2019, the Penn Center for Cancer Care Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania’s Abramson Cancer Center began planning a demonstration program, called Cancer Care at Home, to broaden the delivery of oncology treatments to patients in the home setting. The existing services offered by Penn...
The Yale Cancer Center has announced the appointments of Thomas Prebet, MD, PhD, as Disease Aligned Research Team (DART) Leader for Myeloid Malignancies and Amer Zeidan, MBBS, as Director of the Hematology Early Therapeutics Program. In these new roles, Drs. Prebet and Zeidan will work closely with ...
The desire to pursue a career in medicine took root when Lori J. Pierce, MD, FASTRO, FASCO, was a young child visiting family in segregated Ahoskie, North Carolina. She witnessed firsthand the impact the town’s lone African American family physician had on the community. When it came time to...
The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) announced that its first-ever Virtual Annual Meeting attracted a vast worldwide audience, with more than 61,000 registrants from 140 countries. Held April 27 and 28, the 2-day meeting featured practice-changing clinical trials, innovative basic...
Pulling together the 2020 American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) Virtual Annual Meeting in less than 1 month was a Herculean task, and an important component was producing a session on COVID-19 and cancer care. This special session involved researchers from the front lines of the pandemic...
Thomas J. Herzog, MD, Deputy Director, University of Cincinnati Cancer Center, who presented a distillation of the PRIMA trial data along with updated results of the phase III PAOLA-1 trial of olaparib plus bevacizumab maintenance, called the data “practice-changing.” “We’ve suspected for a while...
Making sense of maintenance therapy in advanced ovarian cancer has been a tall order since the publication of impressive data for not one but three PARP inhibitors at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2019 Congress.1 The picture became a little clearer on April 29, 2020, however,...
Formal I-SPY 2 trial discussant, Pamela N. Munster, MD, Professor in the Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, found the study promising but said confirmatory trials are needed. “What we know so far in preoperative therapy for breast cancer is that pathologic complete...
As the worldwide cases of the coronavirus started to mount in February and March, medical societies and organizations monitoring the escalating COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on international and domestic travel made the difficult decision to postpone or cancel their scientific conferences. On...
When I chose my Presidential theme for the 2020 ASCO Annual Meeting, “Unite and Conquer: Accelerating Progress Together,” in early 2019, I never imagined it would take on a new meaning 12 months later. The world is grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic, and, even as we practice social distancing, I...
Despite facing challenges such as limited access to personal protective equipment (PPE) following the COVID-19 outbreak, radiation oncology clinics quickly implemented safety and process enhancements that allowed them to continue caring for patients, according to a new national survey conducted by...
In a phase II study reported in The Lancet Oncology, Shu et al found that neoadjuvant treatment with atezolizumab plus nab-paclitaxel/carboplatin produced a major pathologic response in 57% of patients and a complete pathologic response in 33% of patients with resectable, predominantly stage IIIA...
AS I WRITE TO YOU, I am happy to report I have just completed a 7-day rotation at the COVID-19 inpatient service at my hospital in New York City! Overall, it was a positive experience, despite the occasional sad and scary moments. I left the service feeling uplifted and fulfilled. I am glad to have ...
A NEW ONLINE GUIDE provides tips to help oncology and other clinicians navigate the difficult and distressing communications with patients that have arisen during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anthony Back, MD, a medical oncologist and palliative medicine specialist at the University of Washington and...
ASCO has released a new clinical guideline titled, “Diagnosis and Management of Squamous Cell Carcinoma of Unknown Primary in the Head and Neck: ASCO Guideline.”1 The guideline, promulgated by an international expert panel, is intended to “provide evidence-based recommendations to practicing...
Over the past few weeks, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Breakthrough Therapy designations for an antibody-drug conjugate in the treatment of gastric and lung cancers. The Agency has also issued Orphan Drug designations for agents being investigated in chronic myeloid...
Although the live 2020 National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Annual Conference was canceled, more than 100 posters scheduled for presentation are now available online, as part of the NCCN 2020 Virtual Annual Conference. The ASCO Post has summarized some of the clinical trial updates we found ...
In the SWOG S1105 trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Dawn L. Hershman, MD, MS, and colleagues found that a text message intervention did not reduce the rate of early discontinuation of adjuvant aromatase inhibitor therapy in postmenopausal women with early-stage breast cancer....
In a phase II German Hodgkin Study Group trial (NIVAHL) reported in JAMA Oncology, Bröckelmann et al found that both concomitant and sequential nivolumab plus AVD (doxorubicin, vinblastine, and dacarbazine) regimens showed efficacy in first-line treatment of early-stage unfavorable classical...
Nickolas Papadopoulos, PhD, of Johns Hopkins Medicine, discusses a first-of-its-kind prospective study that evaluated a screening blood test in more than 10,000 older women with no history of cancer. The test, called DETECT-A, identified 10 different cancer types, 65% of which were early-stage...
A full geriatric assessment and geriatrician-led multidisciplinary care improved the quality of life of patients aged 70 and older undergoing chemotherapy, targeted therapy, or immunotherapy, according to results of a prospective, randomized, controlled, open-label trial, reported in a press...
The COVID-19 pandemic transformed cancer care, seemingly overnight, as practices scrambled to ensure a safe environment for caregivers and patients. Although regulatory burdens have been relaxed to allow patients to continue on trial treatment and telemedicine has expanded its competency and reach, ...
Continuous dosing with dabrafenib and trametinib improved progression-free survival in patients with BRAF-mutated advanced melanoma compared with an intermittent-dosing strategy, according to results of the phase II SWOG S1320 randomized trial reported at the opening Plenary Session of the 2020...
The universe has an intriguing way of registering our wishes and delivering them in convoluted, mutated forms. Last winter, I recall coming home after a long day at the hospital and being ambushed by my 3-year-old daughter and preteen son. She wanted to play, he needed help with homework, and they ...
A survey of American Cancer Society grantees found that about half reported their cancer research has been halted as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The American Cancer Society reached out to all of its funded researchers to assess the state of their projects and collect information to guide...
In hindsight, the symptoms I began experiencing in the fall of 2013—sudden excruciating back bone pain and severe fatigue—should have tipped me off that I had a serious disease, but 7 years ago, they were easy to explain away. The bone pain was similar to what I had experienced several years...
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. Despite significant improvements reported in survival rates, symptom management in pediatric...
Aria Vaishnavi, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah, has received the first annual National Cancer Institute (NCI) Pathway to Independence Award for Outstanding Early Stage Postdoctoral Researchers (K99/R00). The “Early K99” grant supports...
The ASCO Post is pleased to reproduce installments of the Art of Oncology as published previously in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. These articles focus on the experience of suffering from cancer or of caring for people diagnosed with cancer, and they include narratives, topical essays,...
Patient-reported outcomes are measures used in clinical trials to capture aspects of a patient’s health condition, reported directly by the patient, without introduction of bias from third parties. They are distinct from the physical toxicities reported by clinicians1 and are collected using a...
The 2019 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition featured a cornucopia of sessions. It was impossible to attend all the lectures, symposia, oral presentations, poster presentations, and special events because many were concurrent. Below, we have selected some...
In the treatment of HER2-positive early breast cancer, patients who receive dual HER2-targeted therapy in both the neoadjuvant and adjuvant settings are less likely to experience recurrence than those who received dual therapy only as neoadjuvant treatment, according to a pooled analysis of...
In the phase III KEYNOTE-522 trial reported in The New England Journal of Medicine and reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post, Schmid et al1 found that the addition of pembrolizumab to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in stage II or III triple-negative breast cancer significantly improved the pathologic...
As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine by Peter Schmid, MD, PhD, of Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London, and colleagues, analyses in the phase III KEYNOTE-522 trial have shown that the addition of pembrolizumab to neoadjuvant chemotherapy and the use of adjuvant...
Virginia Kaklamani, MD, DSc, Professor of Medicine and Head of the Breast Cancer Program at UT Health San Antonio MD Anderson Cancer Center, moderated a press conference where Milan Radovich, PhD, reported the robust ability of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) and circulating tumor cells to predict...
In early triple-negative breast cancer, the presence of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) and circulating tumor cells after neoadjuvant chemotherapy may enable risk stratification of patients for disease recurrence and may predict outcomes, according to a preplanned correlative analysis of the phase II ...
Studies of second-generation bispecific antibodies were among the highlights of the 2019 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition. The bispecific T-cell engager blinatumomab was the first such agent to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in...
This Clinical Trials Resource Guide lists actively recruiting clinical trials evaluating strategies to improve cancer prevention measures, mostly through increased rates of screening. Some of the following trials also address cancer prevention through improving knowledge of tumor biomarkers,...
In the single-institution phase II PROLUNG trial reported in JAMA Oncology, Oscar Arrieta, MD, and Christian Rolfo, MD, PhD, and colleagues found that the addition of pembrolizumab to docetaxel improved objective response rates and progression-free survival in immunotherapy-naive patients with...
As germline genetic testing becomes more widespread among patients with breast cancer, recommendations for the appropriate management of patients with hereditary breast cancer are needed. Until now, no ASCO guideline has addressed the management of hereditary breast cancer, even for carriers of...
For breast imaging, contrast-enhanced mammography, which uses the anatomic imaging of a mammogram in addition to imaging neovascularity, can offer the overall screening capability of standard mammography and the sensitivity of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at a fraction of the cost of MRI,...