Alexey Danilov, MD, PhD, Co-Director, Toni Stephenson Lymphoma Center and Professor, Division of Lymphoma, Department of Hematology & Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation, City of Hope, Duarte, California, commented on the phase III ALPINE trial comparing ibrutinib and zanubrutinib in patients...
Insights on findings from the phase II MonumenTAL-1 trial1 were offered by Ajay K. Nooka, MD, MPH, Professor in the Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology, and Medical Director of the Winship Data and Technology Applications Shared Resource, Winship Cancer Institute, Emory University School ...
The 2022 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition was full of interesting abstracts in multiple myeloma. In addition to full coverage of several important presentations, The ASCO Post offers readers quick takes on some studies that could be practice-changing and others...
An oncolytic therapy delivered within the urinary bladder in combination with pembrolizumab has yielded high complete response rates in patients with bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG)-unresponsive bladder cancer, according to data presented by Roger Li, MD, lead study investigator and urologic...
In the phase I/II MonumenTAL-1 trial, the novel bispecific antibody talquetamab produced responses in more than 70% of heavily pretreated patients with multiple myeloma.1 Of note, the safety profile confirmed results of the phase I portion of the study (recently published in TheNew England Journal...
In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Wang et al found that a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in ROBO2 was associated with an increased risk of cardiomyopathy among childhood cancer survivors receiving higher cumulative anthracycline doses. As stated by the investigators,...
The adoptive T-cell receptor therapy afamitresgene autoleucel—which targets the MAGE-A4 cancer antigen—achieved clinically significant results for patients with multiple solid tumor types in a phase I clinical trial, according to a novel study published by Hong et al in Nature Medicine. Initial...
Among inpatients with cancer who have neutropenic fever, delaying antibiotic treatment past 60 minutes from the time of fever detection may not reduce the short-term chance of overall survival, according to a new study published by Villars et al in the American Journal of Medical Quality....
Despite widespread awareness of the importance of screening for asymptomatic, early detection of cancer, screening tests exist for only five cancer types. With few recommended cancer screening tests and generally low adherence to cancer screening recommendations, it is difficult to detect cancer...
The KRAS G12C inhibitor sotorasib demonstrated clinically meaningful anticancer activity with an acceptable safety profile in heavily pretreated patients with KRAS G12C–mutated metastatic pancreatic cancer, accordi�ng to a novel study published by Strickler et al in The New England Journal of...
“Risk-reducing bilateral mastectomy allows a woman with a high-penetrance breast cancer-causing mutation to avoid an encounter with the experience of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment,” Seema A. Khan, MD, MPH, stated at the 2022 Lynn Sage Breast Cancer Symposium.1 For these women, by avoiding...
Just days before the publication of the 2022 Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer on October 27, 2022,1 which showed a continued downward trend in cancer deaths, Karen Knudsen, MBA, PhD, Chief Executive Officer of the American Cancer Society (ACS), joined the First Lady Dr. Jill...
Aditya Bardia, MD, MPH, Director of Breast Cancer Research and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, and attending physician at Mass General Cancer Center, Boston, commented on the RIGHT Choice trial. Based on this study, he noted, few patients should be excluded from treatment with...
“I was in bed in the surgical wing of Duke University Hospital when the doctor popped his head in and smiled apologetically before flicking on the fluorescent lights. It was 4:00 AM, the end of my second night in the hospital, but nobody sleeps in the conventional sense,” writes Kate Bowler in the...
On December 16, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved nadofaragene firadenovec-vncg (Adstiladrin), a nonreplicating adenoviral vector–based gene therapy indicated for the treatment of adult patients with high-risk bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG)-unresponsive non–muscle-invasive...
An oncolytic therapy delivered within the urinary bladder in combination with pembrolizumab has yielded the “best results seen in the field” in patients with bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG)-unresponsive bladder cancer, according to data presented during the 2022 Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer...
In an early-phase trial, nearly three-quarters of patients who received talquetamab—a first-in-class, off-the-shelf, T-cell–redirecting bispecific antibody targeting both the GPRC5D and CD3 receptors—for relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma saw a significant reduction in cancer burden within a...
Editor’s Note: ASCO was deeply saddened by the news that Dr. Jeff Ward passed away on November 3, 2022. In an interview with Dr. Ward this past summer, published in ASCO Connection (August 30, 2022), ASCO recognized Dr. Ward’s commitment to exceptional patient care and public advocacy. An...
My father was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1994, when he was just 55 years old. He died 6 years later. The cancer was so aggressive, it took only a few weeks from the time he was diagnosed for the cancer to grow to the size of a softball, and even a radical prostatectomy couldn’t save his...
“I knew my husband was dying in June. He’d been living with a terminal diagnosis for 6 years, but suddenly his cancer turned aggressive…. The last time we saw the oncologist, he sent us home with a DNR order and told me to put it on the refrigerator, because that’s where the EMTs look,” writes...
Breast cancer specialist Brittany L. Bychkovsky, MD, MSc, grew up primarily in Kansas; however, given that her father was a pilot, her childhood was not wholly centered in the Sunflower State. “When I was 12 years old, my mom, who was a schoolteacher, was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer. Her ...
The repercussions from the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 24, 2022, to overturn Roe v Wade, effectively ending a nearly 50-year federal constitutional right to an abortion and allowing instead states to determine abortion access, are starting to be felt in the cancer care community. The ...
In addition to, or instead of, receiving therapies that are the standard of care, patients with cancer sometimes request to receive complementary (therapies used in conjunction with standard cancer treatment) and alternative (nonstandard treatments used in place of standard cancer treatment)...
A new ASCO guideline on the management of advanced colorectal cancer summarizes the latest treatments supported by quality data that could expand oncologists’ armamentarium and potentially improve survival outcomes.1 “[Colorectal cancer] remains the second-leading class of cancer deaths among men ...
Invited discussant Erica Michelle Stringer-Reasor, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine and Director of the Breast Cancer Program at the O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Alabama at Birmingham, said the exploratory analysis of KEYNOTE-522 established the value of using residual...
An exploratory analysis of KEYNOTE-522, which established the benefit of neoadjuvant pembrolizumab plus chemotherapy in triple-negative breast cancer, has now provided data to further describe prognosis and possibly guide treatment.1 In the study, presented at the 2022 ASCO Annual Meeting,...
A silicone-based polyurethane film dressing (known as Mepitel® Film) appears to be beneficial in reducing skin toxicities caused by radiation treatment, according to data presented during the October 2022 ASCO Plenary Series.1 The results of a phase III trial showed that this film dressing may be...
Iris C. Gibbs, MD, FACR, FASTRO, of Stanford Medicine in California and Chair of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) Council on Health Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, was an invited discussant for this study on physician assessment of sexual dysfunction in women vs men receiving...
Lori Wilson, MD, FACS, was the first woman to hold the surgical oncology division chief position at Howard University Hospital and the first woman to be promoted to full professor in surgery at Howard University College of Medicine. Known as a fierce advocate for patients with cancer in underserved ...
There is a 2-decades-long separation between the time I was diagnosed with oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma in 1996 and my laryngectomy in 2016. The surgery was necessary because of the long-term damage to my larynx from the radiation therapy I received. In 1996, I had a low-grade sore throat...
In this installment of The ASCO Post’s Living a Full Life series, Guest Editor Jame Abraham, MD, FACP, spoke with C.S. Pramesh, MS, FRCS, Director of the Tata Memorial Hospital and Professor and Head of Thoracic Surgery at the Tata Memorial Centre, Mumbai, India. Dr. Pramesh is the Convener of the...
Marking World Antimicrobial Awareness Week (taking place November 18 to 24), the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) emphasized the danger that drug resistance poses to individuals who are particularly vulnerable to infection, such as people living with cancer. There has been substantial...
Researchers have discovered the factors that may make breast and ovarian cancers associated with BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations more likely to recur, according to new findings published by Shah et al in Nature Communications. These mutations are known to strongly predispose women to breast and...
There I was, crying once again all the way from the hospital’s parking lot to my apartment, into the shower, and while trying to fall asleep. This had become the norm during my internal medicine residency. For years, I tried hard every day to be someone else to fit in. It started with off-hand...
For the first time in a multicenter randomized trial, T-cell therapy has been shown to improve outcomes in a solid tumor. In the phase III M14TIL trial, first-line or second-line treatment with tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) led to a 50% reduction in disease progression or death from advanced ...
I don’t know why I am so susceptible to developing lung cancer. Since 2014, I have been diagnosed with both non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and small cell lung cancer, each occurring in my right lung. I have also been diagnosed with precancerous colon polyps, which necessitated invasive surgery. ...
The pace of cancer drug development may have accelerated over the past decade, but so too has the cost of care, which threatens to limit access for a large percentage of Americans in the decade to come. During the keynote lecture at the 2022 ASCO Quality Care Symposium, Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD, ...
Pain is highly prevalent in people with cancer throughout the disease trajectory. Often persisting for years after initial diagnosis and undertreated, it is associated with poor functional, mental, and cancer-related outcomes.1 Consequently, the need for effective pain management strategies has...
When Stephanie L. Walker, RN, was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 2015, she was not given information about an appropriate clinical trial or help navigating her way through the financial difficulties she was having after a stroke from complications of the cancer forced her to leave her...
Preliminary data from a phase I clinical trial of the ROS1 inhibitor NVL-520 to treat patients with non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and other solid tumors suggested that it may have the potential to both halt tumor growth by inhibiting a cancer-causing gene change and reach cancer cells within...
Patients with rare desmoid tumors may finally have an effective treatment. A first-in-class gamma secretase inhibitor, nirogacestat, led to an improvement in progression-free survival in the phase III DeFi trial. The results were presented during the Presidential Symposium at the European Society...
In addition to, or instead of, receiving therapies that are the standard of care, patients with cancer sometimes request to receive complementary (therapies used in conjunction with standard cancer treatment) and alternative (nonstandard treatments used in place of standard cancer treatment)...
In our continuing effort to connect and learn more about our international oncology colleagues, The ASCO Post recently spoke with Rossana Berardi, MD, Professor in Medical Oncology and Director of the Postgraduate School of Oncology at the Università Politecnica Marche, Ancona, Italy, where she is...
It has been well documented that breast cancer is the most common malignancy in adolescent and young adult (AYA) women aged 15 to 39 years, accounting for 30% of cancers among this population.1 In addition, 5.6% of all invasive breast cancers occur in AYA women.1 A presentation by Rebecca H....
On October 21, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved tremelimumab (Imjudo) in combination with durvalumab (Imfinzi) for the treatment of adult patients with unresectable hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common type of liver cancer. The novel dose and schedule of the...
A multicenter analysis of patients with invasive lobular carcinoma—the second most common histologic subtype of invasive breast cancer in the United States—showed that, despite its prevalence, invasive lobular carcinoma was detected later with worse outcomes vs invasive ductal carcinoma and had...
Researchers have discovered that the organization of different types of immune cells within pancreatic tumors may be associated with how well patients with pancreatic cancer respond to treatment, as well as how long they survive. This information could eventually lead to new ways of treating...
Debu Tripathy, MD, Professor and Chair of Breast Medical Oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, shared his thoughts on TROPiCS-02 with The ASCO Post. He said the study is important because it addresses the needs of “a population with limited options, whose...
Datopotamab deruxtecan, an antibody-drug conjugate directed against trophoblast cell surface antigen-2 (Trop-2), is showing promise as a treatment for relapsed or refractory advanced triple-negative breast cancer, according to early findings from the phase I TROPION-PanTumor01 trial presented...
Amy Tiersten, MD, Professor of Medicine, Hematology, and Medical Oncology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Carlos L. Arteaga, MD, Director of the Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center and Associate Dean of Oncology at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas,...