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,...
Immunotherapy is showing promise for patients with rare cancers, offering new treatment opportunities and clinical trials to those with previously limited options. At the 2020 ASCO-SITC Clinical Immuno-Oncology Symposium, presenters discussed the use of immunotherapy in three low-incidence cancers: ...
Omid Hamid, MD, Chief of Research/Immuno-Oncology, The Angeles Clinic & Research Institute, and Co-Director of the Cutaneous Malignancy Program at Cedars-Sinai Cancer Center, Los Angeles, commented on these two studies for The ASCO Post. According to Dr. Hamid, the findings for the tumor...
Systemic treatment of melanoma has changed rapidly since the introduction of ipilimumab in 2011. Newer therapies approved for melanoma since that time include immunotherapy, targeted therapy for mutation-bearing tumors, and injectional therapy for cutaneous or palpable lesions. ASCO has released...
Based on multiple phase III prospective trials, there is evidence that both PARP inhibitors and antiangiogenic therapies such as bevacizumab provide benefit when utilized in a maintenance strategy in the first-line treatment of advanced epithelial ovarian cancer (GOG 218, ICON7, SOLO-1, PRIMA,...
Ryan J. Sullivan, MD, of Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, discusses early results on COM701, a first-in-class immune checkpoint inhibitor, which showed preliminary antitumor activity as a monotherapy and in combination with nivolumab in a variety of heavily pretreated patients with...
In anticipation of how the COVID-19 pandemic might impact oncology care as the coronavirus spread across New York City, radiation oncologists with expertise in the management of metastatic disease and inpatient oncologic emergencies at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) met in late winter ...
In a special report published by Malcovati et al in the journal Blood, an international working group of experts in myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) has proposed the recognition of a distinct subtype of MDS based on the presence of a nonheritable genetic mutation that causes the disease. The...
Alexandra Leary, MD, PhD, of the Gustave Roussy Institute of Oncology, Paris, underscored the controversy surrounding the use of neoadjuvant chemotherapy in advanced ovarian cancer, suggesting the discord may be “more cultural and emotional than scientific” to some degree. “Some countries, such as ...
On May 6, 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted accelerated approval to capmatinib (Tabrecta) for adult patients with metastatic non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) whose tumors have a mutation that leads to mesenchymal-epithelial transition (MET) exon 14 skipping as detected by...
Patients with cancer who were infected with COVID-19 were much more likely to die from the disease than those without cancer, according to research from physician-researchers at Montefiore Health System and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Their findings were published by Mehta et al in Cancer...
As reported in The Lancet by Brunt et al, 5-year findings from the phase III FAST-Forward trial indicated that adjuvant radiotherapy with 26 Gy in 5 fractions over 1 week was noninferior to 40 Gy in 15 fractions over 3 weeks in preventing local tumor relapse in women with early-stage breast ...
The treatment of colorectal cancer has always been something of an art—but never more so than during the COVID-19 pandemic. The ASCO Post asked three experts in this malignancy to share their concerns and their approaches to achieving good patient outcomes while minimizing the risk of COVID-19...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Suzanne L. Topalian, MD, and colleagues, neoadjuvant treatment with nivolumab was found to produce pathologic complete response in approximately half of patients with resectable Merkel cell carcinoma enrolled in the phase I/II CheckMate 358 trial....
An article by Waterhouse et al in JCO Oncology Practice presented results of a recent ASCO survey of clinical programs exploring the early impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the performance of oncology clinical trials. Results highlighted the numerous issues faced by the programs, steps that are...
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is perhaps the biggest challenge health-care systems have ever had to face. As part of a series of interviews The ASCO Post is conducting with oncologists, we talked with Charles G. Drake, MD, PhD, about the impact of COVID-19 on his practice and on the conduct...
Before the dawn of the modern antibiotic era and amid the chaos of World War II, future Professor of Radiology and Founding Dean of two American medical colleges, Dr. George T. Harrell,* penned what could now be argued was far too bold a statement. As the opening lines of his nonrandomized study...
A special report published by Oudkerk et al in the journal Radiology outlined strategies for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of thromboembolic complications in patients with COVID-19. Based on recent reports that demonstrated a strong association between elevated D-dimer levels and poor...
A risk-prediction model that combined genetic and clinical factors with circulating biomarkers may help to identify people at a significantly higher-than-normal risk of developing pancreatic cancer, according to results of a study published by Peter Kraft, PhD, and colleagues in Cancer...
The Circulating Cell-free Genome Atlas Study is a large multicenter, case-controlled, observational study of 15,254 participants, 56% with cancer and 44% without cancer, with longitudinal follow-up to support the development of a cell-free DNA (cfDNA) multicancer early detection test. In this phase ...
“Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.” ―Hippocrates The ASCO Post is pleased to present Hematology Expert Review, an ongoing feature that occasionally quizzes readers on issues in hematology. In this installment, Drs. Abutalib and Connors...
The TRACERx study investigated phylogenetic tracking and minimal residual disease (MRD) detection using circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) profiling following resection in patients with stage I to III non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Investigators found that ctDNA is an adjuvant biomarker capable of...
The individualization and optimization of adjuvant endocrine therapy for breast cancer are important and not always simple. Guidance on this issue was offered at the 2020 Miami Breast Cancer Conference by Joyce O’Shaughnessy, MD, the Celebrating Woman Chair in Breast Cancer Research at Baylor...
A retrospective analysis from the Southwest Oncology Group S8814 trial, reported by Wendy A. Woodward, MD, PhD, of the Department of Radiation Oncology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and colleagues in JAMA Oncology,1 showed that a low 21-gene assay recurrence score was...
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has concluded that about 21,000 people die each year of lung cancer related to radon gas exposure, making it the second leading cause of lung cancer death in the United States. Although the EPA and various other organizations, including the National Radon ...
Mismatch repair (MMR)-deficiency and consequently high DNA microsatellite instability (MSI-H) are associated with high tumor mutational burden. A high mutational load increases the potential number of neoantigens that can be presented by the tumor cell and recognized by host lymphocytes. Detection...
To complement The ASCO Post’s continued comprehensive coverage of the 2019 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition, here are several abstracts selected from the meeting proceedings focusing on novel therapies for patients with non-Hodgkin lymphomas (NHLs). For full...