The prevalence of both cancer and cognitive impairment increases with age.1-3 Based upon Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER)-Medicare studies, it is estimated that 3% to 7% of patients with cancer aged ≥ 65 also suffer from dementia, although the true prevalence of dementia in this...
The following five abstracts were chosen as the best submitted studies presented at this year’s International Conference of the Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO). They represent a diverse group of integrative therapies and interventions in the care of patients with cancer, including an...
Myles Brown, MD, Director of the Center for Functional Cancer Epigenetics at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, suggested the failure of the endocrine therapy to increase the pathologic complete response rates “may be related to the fact that the aromatase inhibitor was not the optimal...
The addition of estrogen deprivation to neoadjuvant chemotherapy and HER2 blockade did not enhance the achievement of pathologic complete responses in women with early-stage breast cancer, according to the results of the NRG Oncology/NSABP B-52 trial reported at the 2016 San Antonio Breast Cancer...
Press conference moderator Carlos L. Arteaga, MD, said: “This drug is not necessarily the same as palbociclib [Ibrance] or ribociclib. There are subtle differences among these three [cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) 4/6] inhibitors. The tissue analysis provides us with an enormous opportunity to...
As neoadjuvant therapy, abemaciclib alone or in combination with anastrozole achieved strong signals of anticancer activity in postmenopausal patients with hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative breast cancer in the neoMONARCH phase II study.1 Abemaciclib alone or in combination with anastrozole...
The addition of everolimus (Afinitor) to fulvestrant (Faslodex) doubled progression-free survival in postmenopausal women with hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer resistant to aromatase inhibitor therapy compared with fulvestrant plus placebo, according to the...
On December 21, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allowed marketing of a new tissue-expander system for soft-tissue expansion in two-stage breast reconstruction following mastectomy and in the treatment of underdeveloped breasts and soft-tissue deformities. A patient uses a dose...
The investigational CD33-directed antibody-drug conjugate vadastuximab talirine yielded high overall and complete response rates when combined with standard “7+3” chemotherapy for patients newly diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.1 Results from this phase Ib study were presented at the 2016...
Despite the fact that 28 states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws to permit the use of cannabis and cannabinoid-based drugs to treat medical conditions, including cancer and symptoms from its treatment, federal law prohibits physicians from prescribing marijuana to their patients,...
Speaking about the GALLIUM study in the ASH News Daily, Brad S. Kahl, MD, of Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, commented, “It is a potentially practice-changing study that clearly shows an 8% absolute improvement in progression-free survival at 2 years for the patients getting...
In the phase III PALOMA-2 trial reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Richard S. Finn, MD, of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues found that the addition of palbociclib (Ibrance) to letrozole significantly improved...
There has been no better time than the present for women in the field of oncology: Women at all stages of their careers are finding more opportunities and avenues to excel. At the time of the last ASCO workforce survey, women made up 28.4% of the oncologist workforce, and that proportion is rising...
A routine blood test may predict how long patients with cancer in palliative care will survive, researchers reported at the ESMO Asia 2016 Congress in Singapore. “Cancer patients in palliative care want honest and accurate prognostic information but this information needs to be shared...
A brain-boosting protein plays an important role in how well people respond to chemotherapy, researchers reported at the ESMO Asia 2016 Congress in Singapore. A study (Abstract 497O_PR) found that patients with cancer suffering from depression have decreased amounts of brain-derived neurotrophic...
The first data on rare sarcomas in Asian patients were presented in three studies at the ESMO Asia 2016 Congress in Singapore. Just half of patients with advanced angiosarcoma received chemotherapy, although it improved overall survival. CIC-rearranged sarcomas were associated with a much worse...
In the phase III AURA3 trial reported in The New England Journal of Medicineby Mok et al, osimertinib (Tagrisso) significantly improved progression-free survival (PFS) vs platinum/pemetrexed (Alimta) among patients with epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) T790M–positive non–small...
The artificial-intelligence platform Watson for Oncology (WFO) achieved a high degree of concordance with the recommendations of a panel of oncologists in a double-blinded validation study, according to results presented at the 2016 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, held December 6 to 10...
Postmenopausal women with breast cancer who took aromatase inhibitors demonstrated endothelial dysfunction, a predictor of cardiovascular disease, according to study results presented at the 2016 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, held December 6 to 10 (Abstract s5-07). Aromatase inhibitors are...
“I am greatly saddened by the death of former Congressman Melvin R. Laird, who, over the course of his distinguished career in public service, played a key role in advancing biomedical research and the mission of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Our thoughts are with his family and the...
Presurgical treatment with the investigational therapeutic abemaciclib, either alone or in combination with the aromatase inhibitor anastrozole, reduced levels of Ki67, a marker of cell proliferation, in hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative breast cancer cells, compared with anastrozole...
Scientific Names: Valeriana officinalis, Valeriana radix Common Names: Garden valerian, Indian valerian, Pacific valerian, garden heliotrope Overview A perennial flowering plant prevalent in Europe, Asia, and North America, valerian has a long medicinal history as a relaxant. Its potential as a...
Adding the investigational poly ADP ribose polymerase (PARP) inhibitor veliparib to carboplatin and paclitaxel chemotherapy improved the overall response rate without increasing adverse events among patients who had locally recurrent or metastatic breast cancer with BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations,...
A sentinel lymph node biopsy during surgery that showed no signs of cancer was associated with a low risk for breast cancer recurrence in the axillary lymph nodes for patients with large, operable breast tumors and no clinical signs of the cancer in the axillary lymph nodes prior to neoadjuvant...
In recognition of wide-ranging contributions to the fields of cancer prevention; patient care; and basic, translational, and clinical research, seven faculty members from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of...
Roy S. Herbst, MD, PhD, of Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, was recognized by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) with a distinguished award at the 17th World Conference on Lung Cancer in Vienna, Austria. Dr. Herbst accepted the Paul A. Bunn Jr. Scientific...
Ellen V. Sigal, PhD, Chair and Founder of Friends of Cancer Research (Friends) began the annual meeting with a conversation with Douglas R. Lowy, MD, National Cancer Institute (NCI) Acting Director, and Robert M. Califf, MD, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner. “Cancer research is ...
The antioxidant sodium thiosulfate provided protection against cisplatin-related hearing loss in children with cancer, according to a phase III trial reported by Freyer et al in The Lancet Oncology. The open-label trial included 104 assessable patients (aged 1 to 18 years) from 38 Children’s ...
Blood has covered experimental and clinical hematologic research as the flagship journal of the American Society of Hematology (ASH). Launched officially on November 29, 2016, the open-access online journal Blood Advances will fill a niche that complements and expands on topics covered in Blood...
The American Society of Hematology (ASH) recognized Representative David McKinley (R-WV) and Roy Wu, PhD, former Chief of the Clinical Grants and Contracts Branch for the Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), with awards for their outstanding advocacy for...
Despite the routine use of HER2 blockade in early HER2-positive breast cancer, clinicians can always benefit from a refresher on key treatment considerations. Clinical pearls and controversial issues were the topic of a presentation at the 14th Annual School of Breast Oncology at Emory University, ...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) generic drug program has substantially increased the availability of affordable, high-quality drugs in the United States. It is arguably the only really effective health-care cost–containment program. The more than 10,000 generic drugs currently...
The information contained in this Clinical Trials Resource Guide includes actively recruiting clinical studies focused on immunotherapy as treatment for renal cell carcinoma. These studies are researching combination chemotherapies; immunotherapies; radiosurgery techniques; stereotactic body...
The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) honored two renowned researchers for their work in breast cancer at the 2016 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS), held December 6–10 in San Antonio, Texas. Fergus J. Couch, PhD, of the Mayo Clinic, will receive the 9th Annual AACR...
In an article in The Lancet Oncology, Y. Tony Yang, ScD, of George Mason University, Charles L. Bennett, MD, PhD, MPP, of the University of South Carolina and colleagues from the United States, Europe, and Japan examined clinical, policy, safety, and regulatory considerations for generic oncology...
Five additional years of hormone therapy with letrozole following an initial 5 years of aromatase inhibitor-based adjuvant hormone therapy did not demonstrate a statistical improvement in disease-free survival or overall survival in postmenopausal women with early-stage hormone...
Progression-free survival was more than doubled for patients with metastatic hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative breast cancer resistant to aromatase inhibitor therapy by adding everolimus (Afinitor) to treatment with the endocrine therapeutic fulvestrant (Faslodex), according to data...
Genomic sequencing of estrogen receptor–positive metastatic breast cancer that had become resistant to therapies revealed multiple genomic and molecular alterations that were not present in the primary tumor samples, with implications for choice of next therapy, clinical trial eligibility,...
With drug approvals for immunotherapy in the first- and second-line settings, breakthroughs in targeting epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutations, and the rapid evolution of therapies that target anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) rearrangements, 2016 has been an extraordinary year for lung...
Oncologists may be accustomed to looking for commonalities in patients, but highly personalized therapies are now being developed based on mutational analysis of tumors. According to data presented at the Cedars-Sinai annual symposium on New Therapeutics in Oncology: The Road to Personalized...
Two studies presented at the 28th EORTC-NCI-AACR Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics in Munich focused on the inhibition of mutations in the KIT and PDGFRα oncogenes. These genes encode receptor tyrosine kinases, and when they are mutated, cell signaling malfunctions, leading to...
The future treatment of melanoma may rely on combinations of immunotherapy agents beyond the current checkpoint inhibitors, and they are entering clinical trials, according to Jeffrey Weber, MD, PhD, Deputy Director of the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center at New York University Langone...
One immune checkpoint inhibitor has now moved to the front of the line for treating advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Based on pivotal studies presented at the 2016 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress, pembrolizumab (Keytruda) became a first-line option, and it is...
Positive studies about brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris) in cutaneous T-cell lymphoma1 and rituximab (Rituxan) maintenance therapy in mantle cell lymphoma (MCL)2 were reported at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Hematology (ASH). “These abstracts each focus on approved agents and...
In part 1 of a phase III equivalence trial reported in JAMA, Rugo et al found that treatment with trastuzumab (Herceptin) or a proposed trastuzumab biosimilar in combination with a taxane produced similar overall response rates in patients with previously untreated metastatic HER2-positive breast...
Trial results presented by Stadtmauer during the 58th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition in San Diego (Abstract LBA-1) suggest two therapies that are often added to standard therapy in patients with multiple myeloma do not improve rates of progression-free survival ...
Despite an elevated risk of toxicity from chemotherapy, children with Down syndrome and acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) did not experience higher rates of relapse or treatment-related mortality compared with other children treated on Dana-Farber Cancer Institute ALL Consortium Protocols,...
A combination of two targeted agents has demonstrated safety as well as encouraging signs of effectiveness in a phase I clinical trial in patients with relapsed or hard-to-treat chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) or mantle cell lymphoma (MCL). Davids et al reported the findings at the 58th American ...
A late-breaking abstract being presented by Churchman et al during the 58th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition in San Diego (Abstract LBA-2) identifies inherited genetic mutations in the gene IKZF1 that confer a higher likelihood of developing pediatric...
A late-breaking abstract presented by Miklos et al during the 58th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition in San Diego (Abstract LBA-3) showed patients who experience graft-vs-host disease (GVHD) after stem cell transplantation that is not resolved by corticosteroid...