As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Hedy L. Kindler, MD, FASCO, and colleagues, the final overall survival analysis of the phase III POLO trial showed no significant difference between the maintenance olaparib group vs the placebo group in patients with germline BRCA-mutated...
In the phase III CAIRO5 study, conducted by the Dutch Colorectal Cancer Group, triplet vs doublet chemotherapy plus bevacizumab significantly increased progression-free survival, response rate, and the rate of R0/R1 resections, with and without ablation, in patients with initially unresectable...
1,2-Dichloropropane (1,2-DCP) is a synthetic organic solvent used in the printing industry. It was linked to cholangiocarcinoma in 2013, when printing company employees in Osaka, Japan, exposed to 1,2-DCP were diagnosed with the cancer. Thereafter, the International Agency for Research on Cancer...
Daily exposure to a class of chemicals used in the production of many household items may lead to cancer, thyroid disease, and childhood obesity, a new study published by Obsekov et al in the journal Exposure and Health showed. The resulting economic burden is estimated to cost Americans a minimum...
Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) who previously developed a blood test for mutations in a gene linked to gliomas have now applied their technology to detect additional mutations—in this case, in the gene that codes for the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). The advance,...
As reported in JAMA Oncology by Matthew H.G. Katz, MD, and colleagues, the National Clinical Trials Network phase II A021501 trial has shown better survival outcomes with neoadjuvant modified FOLFIRINOX (mFOLFIRINOX; oxaliplatin, irinotecan, leucovorin, fluorouracil) vs mFOLFIRINOX plus...
Brentuximab vedotin plus doxorubicin, vinblastine, and dacarbazine (a regimen known as A+AVD) significantly reduced the risk of mortality vs standard treatment with doxorubicin, bleomycin, vinblastine, and dacarbazine (ABVD) in patients with previously untreated stage III or IV classical Hodgkin...
The invited discussant of PALOMA-2 was Claudine Isaacs, MD, Professor of Medicine and Oncology at Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, Georgetown University, Washington, DC. Dr. Isaacs examined the findings in context of the MONALEESA trials, which showed an overall survival benefit with...
In some patients with hepatocellular carcinoma, downstaging of disease to within criteria that qualify the patient for a liver transplant leads to excellent 10-year posttransplant outcomes, according to new research published by Tabrizian et al in JAMA Surgery. The results validate current national ...
From June 10 to 15, delegates from the Association for Clinical Oncology (ASCO) participated in the 2022 Annual Meeting of the American Medical Association’s (AMA) House of Delegates (HOD). The AMA HOD is the principal policy-making body of AMA and meets twice a year to discuss pressing issues and...
ASCO has issued a new practice guideline update on the use of systemic therapy for HER2-positive breast cancer, just 4 years after the previous practice guideline update was released in 2018.1,2 This latest update reviews results from multiple clinical trials published between 2016 and 2021 that...
For some patients aged 55 or older with early-stage, low-risk breast cancer, endocrine therapy following breast-conserving surgery may be sufficient without the need for postoperative radiation therapy, according to the results of the prospective LUMINA trial, reported at the 2022 ASCO Annual...
It has been 14 years since a collaboration between the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Pfizer identified a unique role for cyclin-dependent kinase 4/6 (CDK4/6) inhibitors in estrogen receptor (ER)-positive human cell line models and demonstrated that these agents act...
A multitude of presentations were available to attendees at the 2022 ASCO Annual Meeting, including hundreds in the hematologic malignancies tracks. In addition to coverage in The ASCO Post of the major news stories at the meeting, here we offer summaries of additional studies of special interest...
Time-limited venetoclax-based regimens provide deeper and more durable remissions than chemoimmunotherapy combinations in patients with previously untreated chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), regardless of patients’ fitness, according to late-breaking data presented during the European Hematology...
A new Survivor Views survey from the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network (ACS CAN) showed that a majority of respondents (83%) who had applied to a copay assistance program and were accepted said the assistance enables them to get the medication they otherwise couldn’t afford. However,...
In the phase III EVEREST trial, adjuvant everolimus improved median recurrence-free survival in patients with resected renal cell carcinoma (RCC), but this finding failed to be statistically significant in the total study population of 1,499 patients, according to a prespecified boundary. However,...
Telling children about their mother’s risk of hereditary breast and/or ovarian cancer does not adversely influence the offspring’s lifestyle or quality of life in the long term, according to a new study published by McDonnell et al in the journal Pediatrics. The study looked at the mutation status...
Assessing the thickness of melanoma is difficult—whether done by an experienced dermatologist or a well-trained machine-learning algorithm. A study published by Polesie et al in the Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology showed that an algorithm and a group of approximately...
In a single-institution phase Ib/II trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Kim A. Reiss, MD, and colleagues found that maintenance treatment with niraparib/ipilimumab produced better 6-month progression-free survival rates than niraparib/nivolumab in patients with advanced pancreatic cancer without ...
In countries with a high income, research in oncology is sponsored by funding agencies and industry, which has meaningfully improved survival outcomes of patients with cancer. In contrast, the African continent is disadvantaged in all aspects of human development, particularly in the fields of...
In a Canadian single-institution feasibility study reported in JACC: CardioOncology, Amy A. Kirkham, PhD, of the University of Toronto, and colleagues found that a time-restricted eating intervention reduced cardiovascular risk among older breast cancer survivors with risk factors for...
As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine by Gabriel N. Hortobagyi, MD, of the Department of Breast Medical Oncology, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, and colleagues, the protocol-specified final overall survival analysis of the phase III MONALEESA-2 trial has shown a significant...
Although aromatase inhibitors are effective in reducing estrogen levels and the risk of cancer recurrence in women diagnosed with hormone receptor–positive breast cancer, they can also cause myriad side effects, including genitourinary problems associated with menopause such as vaginal dryness,...
In this installment of Living a Full Life, Guest Editor Jame Abraham, MD, FACP, spoke with Mark A. Lewis, MD, Director of Gastrointestinal Oncology at Intermountain Healthcare, Murray, Utah, and Vice President of American Multiple Endocrine Neoplasia Support. Dr. Lewis is also a social media...
In the French phase III LMS-04 trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Pautier et al found that the addition of trabectedin to doxorubicin significantly prolonged progression-free survival as first-line treatment for patients with unresectable or metastatic leiomyosarcoma. Study Details In the...
Caregivers for patients with multiple myeloma may suffer from higher rates of anxiety and depression than patients themselves, according to a new study published by O’Donnell in Blood Advances. Although medical professionals have long acknowledged the toll a serious or terminal diagnosis can have...
As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine by Pasi A. Jänne, MD, PhD, and colleagues, findings in a phase II cohort of the multicohort KRYSTAL-1 phase I/II study indicate that the KRAS G12C inhibitor adagrasib showed activity in previously treated patients with unresectable or metastatic...
As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Constantine S. Tam, MBBS, PhD, and colleagues, an interim analysis in the phase III SEQUOIA trial has shown significantly improved progression-free survival with first-line zanubrutinib vs bendamustine/rituximab in patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia...
As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Sehgal et al, the phase II PILOT trial showed that the autologous, CD19-directed chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell product lisocabtagene maraleucel produced a high response rate in the second-line treatment of patients with relapsed or refractory large...
Researchers analyzed data from each of the 5,329 patients across the United States who used medical aid in dying in the 23 years after Oregon became the first state to legalize the practice (in 1997) and found one demographic dominates the group: well-educated, White patients with cancer. These...
The effective treatment of patients with brain metastases is an unmet need because, until fairly recently, patients with brain metastases were excluded from clinical trials of systemic therapies. However, the emergence of molecular targeted therapies has allowed a new treatment approach in patients ...
As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine by Stephen M. Ansell, MD, PhD, and colleagues, an analysis at 6 years of follow-up in the phase III ECHELON-1 trial has shown significantly improved overall survival with brentuximab vedotin plus doxorubicin, vinblastine, and dacarbazine (A+AVD) vs ...
In a single-institution retrospective cohort study reported in JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery, Alkhatib et al found a higher rate of response to immune checkpoint inhibitor treatment among patients with histologic high-grade vs low-grade recurrent or metastatic mucosal head and neck...
In a single-institution study reported in JAMA Oncology, Manali I. Patel, MD, MPH, MS, and colleagues found that the addition of a community health worker–led intervention to usual care resulted in reduced use of acute care, increased advance care planning documentation, increased use of palliative ...
A new report published by Jingxuan Zhao, MPH, and colleagues in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians showed that individuals without health insurance coverage were significantly more likely to be diagnosed with late-stage cancer and have worse survival rates after cancer diagnosis compared to...
In a single-institution retrospective cohort study reported in JAMA Oncology, Han et al found that patients with autoimmune diseases had similar outcomes with immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) therapy for solid tumors as those without autoimmune diseases, with occurrence vs no occurrence of...
In the Korean phase II Neo-PATH trial reported in JAMA Oncology, Ahn et al found that neoadjuvant treatment with atezolizumab, pertuzumab/trastuzumab, and docetaxel produced a pathologic complete response in 61% of patients with HER2-positive stage II/III breast cancer treated with the regimen....
On July 14, 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved crizotinib (Xalkori) for adult and pediatric patients aged 1 year and older with unresectable, recurrent, or refractory inflammatory anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK)-positive myofibroblastic tumors. Two Trials The safety and...
Lutetium-177–labeled PSMA-617 (LuPSMA; lutetium Lu 177 vipivotide tetraxetan) achieved longer progression-free survival with fewer toxicities compared with cabazitaxel in patients with prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA)-positive metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer whose disease...
On July 13, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an emergency use authorization (EUA) for the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine, adjuvanted, for the prevention of COVID-19 caused by SARS–CoV-2 in individuals aged 18 years and older. “Authorizing an additional COVID-19 vaccine expands the...
In a pooled analysis of patients with follicular lymphoma treated in National Clinical Trials Network trials reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Rutherford et al found evidence that bone marrow biopsies can be avoided in response assessment. The investigators stated, “Bone marrow biopsies ...
In an Australian phase I study reported in The Lancet Oncology, Carroll et al found that maintaining baseline immunosuppression in kidney transplant recipients receiving immune checkpoint inhibitor treatment for advanced solid tumors did not appear to increase the risk of irretrievable allograft...
In patients with multiple myeloma exposed or refractory to three standard therapies, treatment with the bispecific antibody teclistamab produced strong and durable responses in the phase I/II MajesTEC-1 study.1 The results of weekly subcutaneous dosing of teclistamab in 165 patients were presented...
A phase II clinical trial of poziotinib for patients with non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) exon 20 mutations found the drug had significant antitumor activity and the efficacy was highly dependent on the location of the exon 20 loop insertion, which may ...
In a single-institution study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Valanparambil et al found that one-quarter of patients with non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) had poor antibody responses to the SARS–CoV-2 wild-type (WT) strain after mRNA vaccination, and that neutralizing antibody...
In an analysis of long-term follow-up of the UKALL2003 trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Anthony V. Moorman, PhD, and colleagues found that whereas initial risk of relapse in children and young adults with acute lymphoblastic leukemia differed according to risk factors, risk...
CLN-081, a novel agent targeted to non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) cells harboring epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) exon 20 insertion mutations—ie, the addition of nucleotide base pairs in exon 20 of the EGFR gene, a known oncogenic driver event—holds promise, according to the results of...
A team of researchers in Australia and New Zealand reported that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans may be able to detect prostate cancer more accurately than the newer, prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) positron-emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) scanning technique. The...
Researchers who treated a group of patients with bladder cancer with the immunotherapy atezolizumab after they had undergone surgery have found that patients whose blood contained circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) responded very well to the treatment. The study was presented at the European Association ...