Here we present summaries of several additional clinical trials in HER2-positive breast cancer reported over the past year. Jame Abraham, MD, Chair of the Division of Hematology and Oncology at the Taussig Cancer Center, Cleveland Clinic, shared his perspective on several of these trials presented ...
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three scientists who have made a decisive contribution to the fight against blood-borne hepatitis, a major global health problem that causes cirrhosis and liver cancer in people around the world. Harvey J. Alter, MD; Michael Houghton, ...
Invited study discussant Lisa A. Carey, MD, the Richardson and Marilyn Jacobs Preyer Distinguished Professor in Breast Cancer Research and Deputy Director of Clinical Sciences at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, framed her remarks as a tale of two trials. Dr. Carey asked these...
Based on some unexpected negative results, oncologists using atezolizumab for metastatic triple-negative breast cancer should pair it with nab-paclitaxel, not paclitaxel. In contrast to the overall survival benefit shown for atezolizumab plus nab-paclitaxel in the previous IMpassion130...
Recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Priority Review to therapies for pretreated patients with multiple myeloma and pediatric patients with ALK-positive anaplastic large cell lymphoma; granted Fast Track designation to novel agents in gastric/gastroesophageal junction...
In the Japanese RESPECT trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Sawaki et al found that noninferiority of adjuvant trastuzumab alone vs with chemotherapy was not shown for disease-free survival among women with HER2-positive breast cancer between the ages of 70 and 80 years. However, a...
For patients with rectal adenocarcinoma treated with neoadjuvant therapy followed by operative resection, “achieving a pathologic complete response is associated with excellent long-term disease-free and overall survival,” according to the results of a study reported by Naomi M. Sell, MD, MHS, of...
Findings from ASCO’s fourth annual National Cancer Opinion Survey showed the toll the COVID-19 pandemic is taking on patients with cancer and the concerns over delays in scheduling cancer screenings. In addition, a majority of survey respondents acknowledged that racism can impact the care a person ...
Five years ago, as Rachel B. Issaka, MD, MAS, was beginning her second year as a gastroenterology fellow and feeling proud of the progress she was making in her training, she was suddenly confronted with an all-too-familiar slight that underrepresented minority providers may often experience. As...
In a paper published by Banerjee et al in JAMA Network Open, researchers reported that genetic testing is cost-effective and beneficial for newly diagnosed patients with metastatic gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST), a type of soft-tissue sarcoma that develops in specialized nerve cells in the...
Each year in the United States, about five million adults with cancer are admitted to hospitals. Given our aging population, this trend will increase, putting added stress on the oncology community, which is already dealing with an impending workforce shortage. Although physician extenders, such...
In a quality-of-life analysis from the phase IV CARD trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Karim Fizazi, MD, and colleagues found that cabazitaxel was associated with improved pain response, time to pain progression, and time to symptomatic skeletal events vs abiraterone or enzalutamide in...
A gift of $126 million to the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine will accelerate advances in finding cures for cancer and expand innovative treatment options. The donation is the single largest in the University of Miami’s 95-year...
Before Judith Kaur, MD, the self-proclaimed “Mother of the YIA” became Conquer Cancer®, the ASCO Foundation’s first grant recipient more than 35 years ago, she was a wife, a teacher, and then a stay-at-home mom. Going to medical school and becoming a research pioneer was just a daydream. “When I...
Flexibilities in reimbursement that have allowed the expanded use of telemedicine during the COVID-19 pandemic should continue and be made available to more providers and patients, according to a recent statement from ASCO. ASCO Interim Position Statement: Telemedicine in Cancer Care also calls for ...
A large cohort study with close to 160,000 men and women reported that “recent-onset diabetes accompanied by weight loss was associated with a substantial increase in risk for pancreatic cancer and may represent a high-risk group in the general population for whom early detection strategies would...
Conquer Cancer®, the ASCO Foundation has joined forces with the Israel Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) to grant a 2020 Career Development Award (CDA) to a physician-scientist in Israel. The CDA supports early-career clinical and translational investigators during their first few years of faculty...
Cancer in My Community is a Cancer.Net Blog series that shows the global impact of cancer and how providers work to care for people with cancer in their region. Why I Care for People With Cancer When you tell someone that you are a pediatric oncologist and treat children with cancer, the first...
The National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®) has announced the availability of multiple non–English-language versions of the NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology® (NCCN Guidelines®) for numerous high-incidence cancer types. These treatment recommendations can be accessed for free at...
The Corporation of Brown University has approved the establishment of the Cancer Center at Brown. The center takes a broad-spectrum approach to research, from working to understand how cancer develops, grows, and metastasizes, to developing new therapeutics for patients in a personalized way that...
In september, 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, released new data from the 2020 National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS). The results, published by Wang et al in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), showed 1.8 ...
Most of the newer systemic treatments for breast cancer can be safely and effectively paired with radiation therapy—although there are some exceptions, according to Mylin A. Torres, MD, the Louisa and Rand Glenn Family Chair in Breast Cancer Research and Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology at ...
The first half of 2016 was arguably the most exciting of my life. My wife, Jaione, and I had decided to leave the United Kingdom and move with our two children, Andrew, then 14, and Alba, then 10, to Denver, where I was taking on a leadership role in corporate affairs for a brewery company. By the...
She was elderly, slightly confused, and very, very worried. I was not quite sure why. It was a minor procedure—a routine angiogram, one of a dozen to be performed that morning. The risks were so small that the job of admitting her had been handed to me, then a final-year medical student, with a...
The ASCO Post is pleased to continue this occasional special focus on the worldwide cancer burden. In this issue, we feature a close look at the cancer incidence and mortality rates in Botswana. The aim of this special feature is to highlight the global cancer burden for various countries of the...
As a young girl growing up in central New Jersey, Joyce F. Liu, MD, MPH, a medical oncologist specializing in gynecologic cancers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, dreamed of becoming an astronaut. However, she realized her fear of heights and propensity for motion sickness didn’t jive with...
Leading cancer scientists working with the New York Genome Center (NYGC) announced that grants are being awarded to fund six projects that address the role of ethnicity in several major cancer types, taking advantage of the diversity of patients being treated at health-care institutions throughout...
City of Hope is investigating an innovative treatment for patients with cancer and COVID-19 by repurposing leflunomide, an anti-inflammatory drug for rheumatoid arthritis that is inexpensive and has few serious side effects, in a new clinical trial. Patients treated for cancer in the past 2 years...
Age is not just a number when it comes to prognosis for invasive breast cancer. According to data presented during the 2020 Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) International Conference on Surgical Cancer Care, age at diagnosis of breast cancer is a highly prognostic clinical variable that warrants...
Christopher Anker, MD, a radiation oncologist at The University of Vermont Medical Center and Associate Professor at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont, Burlington, told The ASCO Post that although the benefit to overall survival disappeared with time likely due to a power ...
In a demonstration of global collaboration, clinician-scientists have pooled data from 121 hospitals in 8 countries to find that inexpensive, widely available steroids may improve the odds that very sick patients with COVID-19 will survive the illness. The findings were made through the Randomized...
“In 2015, papers showed that ctDNA could suggest relapse noninvasively in serial plasma samples. In those studies, ctDNA was positive prior to relapse detected by computed tomography scans,” explained session moderator David Scott, MBChB, PhD, of the Center for Lymphoid Cancer, BC Cancer,...
Liquid biopsies using circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) have the potential to personalize medicine for patients with lymphoma, going beyond traditional markers and risk factors to provide dynamic assessments over time. Expanded applications of ctDNA liquid biopsy beyond diagnosis include early response ...
“Good morning! I’m Dr. Saksena. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” I wave my introduction as I enter the room. Two women sit beside each other. One of them wears a mask that reads “lipstick optional,” and the other dons a surgical mask. This is a new visit for breast cancer, but I haven’t yet deciphered ...
A review of the 2019 Drug Trials Snapshots Report1 from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) showed that although female participation in clinical trials grew to 72% from 56% in the FDA’s 2018 Drug Trials Snapshots Report,2 ethnic minority participation in clinical trials actually declined...
The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) has released the 10th edition of its annual Cancer Progress Report. The report highlights how cancer research, largely supported by federal investments in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), is...
Almost half of patients who received the PARP inhibitor olaparib for newly diagnosed BRCA-mutated advanced ovarian cancer remained disease-free after 5 years, according to data presented by Susana Banerjee, MBBS, PhD, and colleagues during the ESMO Virtual Congress 2020 (Abstract 811MO). Patients...
In a large group of patients with metastatic colorectal cancer, consumption of a few cups of coffee a day was associated with longer survival and reduced risk of disease progression, according to findings reported by Mackintosh et al in JAMA Oncology. The findings, based on data from a large...
“Studies that have compared neoadjuvant endocrine therapy with neoadjuvant chemotherapy have shown low pathologic complete response rates with both approaches. However, the rates of breast-conserving surgery have been shown to be slightly higher with neoadjuvant endocrine therapy,” Kelly Hunt, MD,...
A new report examining cancer in adolescents and young adults (AYAs, defined as diagnoses occurring between the ages of 15 and 39) provides updated estimates of the contemporary cancer burden in this age group, with predictions that 89,500 cases and 9,270 deaths will occur in this group in 2020 in...
For the first time, an inhibitor of cyclin-dependent kinases 4 and 6 (CDK4/6) has improved outcomes in patients with early breast cancer when combined with standard endocrine therapy, Stephen Johnston, MD, PhD, and colleagues reported at the ESMO Virtual Congress 2020 (Abstract LBA5_PR)....
Patient advocates and medical professionals in more than 20 countries have come together for the second annual World Gynecologic Oncology Day (World GO Day), taking place today, September 20. A project of the European Society of Gynaecological Oncology (ESGO) and the European Network of...
In a phase I clinical trial for patients with advanced solid cancers marked by KRAS G12C mutations, the KRAS G12C inhibitor sotorasib (AMG 510) showed manageable toxicities and durable clinical benefits. Results from the trial were published in The New England Journal of Medicine, and data from the ...
Delays and cancellation of cancer treatments and other safety measures undertaken to minimize the risk of exposure to the coronavirus have generated a backlog in oncology care and research. The threat of delayed diagnoses looms while oncology professionals face burnout, according to new studies...
Access to cancer treatments is highly unequal across Europe, both for new drugs in development (due to disparities in access to clinical trials) and for currently approved drugs (due to disparities in health-care spending by different countries), according to results from two studies being...
Recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted designations to agents for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer, recurrent glioblastoma, and pediatric acute myeloid leukemia. Fast Track Designation for EPI-7386 in Metastatic Castration-Resistant Prostate Cancer The FDA...
There are approximately 25 million foreign-born immigrants living in the United States, which is more than 13% of the nation’s total population. Of these individuals, it is estimated that about 11 million are undocumented; by far, the largest group of this immigrant undocumented population is...
In a single-institution study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Hong et al found that mandatory twice-weekly evaluations reduced the need for unplanned acute care visits among patients undergoing outpatient radiotherapy or chemoradiation who were identified as being at high risk for...
In a comprehensive analysis of adenosquamous cancer of the pancreas in preclinical models, researchers identified potential therapeutic targets for this aggressive form of pancreatic cancer. They also identified already-available agents—designed to treat other types of cancer—that may be useful in...
Clinicians who treat multiple myeloma can anticipate a host of new treatments: melflufen, cereblon E3 ligase (CEL) modulators, antibody-drug conjugates, bispecific antibodies, and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies. Kenneth C. Anderson, MD, Director of the Jerome Lipper Multiple...