In a phase II clinical trial, the drug 4-demethyl-4-cholesteryloxycarbonylpenclomedine (DM-CHOC-PEN) improved survival for some adolescent and young adult patients with cancers involving the central nervous system, according to results presented by Morgan et al at the AACR-NCI-EORTC Virtual...
In preclinical models, combining an investigational Aurora kinase A (AURKA) inhibitor with a KRAS inhibitor or a WEE1 inhibitor showed efficacy against lung cancer cells with intrinsic or acquired resistance to KRAS inhibition, according to results presented by Lee et al at the AACR-NCI-EORTC...
In a perspective article published in The New England Journal of Medicine entitled “The Drug-Dosing Conundrum in Oncology—When Less Is More,” four authors from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) argue for the need to jettison the “more is better” paradigm in dose selection for oncology...
This week, the FDA approved new indications for two drugs. The first approval was for abemaciclib in combination with endocrine therapy (tamoxifen or an aromatase inhibitor) for the adjuvant treatment of adult patients with hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative, node-positive, early breast...
A new report finds that more than 46,000 cancer cases annually in the United States could be prevented if Americans met the 5 hours per week of moderate-intensity activity recommended in the American Cancer Society’s physical activity guidelines. Recent findings published by Minihan et al in the...
In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Sabnis et al analyzed characteristics of genomically targeted single-patient use requests for investigational agents for the treatment of pediatric cancers. These requests were made from pediatric cancer programs over a 5-year period. As...
The AACR Cancer Progress Report 2021 celebrates the gains made in cancer research since the National Cancer Act was signed into law on December 23, 1971. The report also recognizes the negative impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on cancer research and patient care, the disproportionate toll both...
As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine by Aditya Bardia, MD, of the Division of Medical Oncology, Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, and colleagues, the phase III ASCENT trial has shown prolonged progression-free and overall survival with the Trop-2–directed antibody-drug...
The latest analysis of the phase III KEYNOTE-522 trial demonstrated significant improvements in clinical outcomes with pembrolizumab plus chemotherapy vs chemotherapy alone as a neoadjuvant/adjuvant treatment of triple-negative breast cancer.1 This is the first large, randomized, phase III trial to ...
Recent clinical trials have been encouraging for the neoadjuvant or adjuvant use of immune checkpoint inhibitors in triple-negative breast cancer, but is this approach ready for the clinic? This question was addressed at the 38th Miami Breast Cancer Conference, held virtually this year, by Adam M....
With three new HER2-targeted therapies approved over the past year or two alone, the treatment landscape for patients with metastatic breast cancer has become increasingly crowded. In the third-line setting and beyond, there are now at least eight HER2-targeted agents approved by the U.S. Food and...
The primary outcome analysis of the phase III monarchE trial, an update of previous data, continued to show significant benefit for abemaciclib in the adjuvant setting, reducing the risk for invasive disease recurrence by 28.7%. Meanwhile, the first results of the phase III PENELOPE-B trial of...
Adjuvant therapy with the PARP inhibitor olaparib for 1 year extended disease-free survival in patients with high-risk early-stage HER2-negative breast cancer with BRCA1/2 germline (inherited) mutations, according to a prespecified interim analysis of the phase III OlympiA trial presented at the...
The past decade has seen an explosion of novel agents for breast cancer across subtypes. Although each new advance improves therapeutic options for patients, it also brings forth a challenging question: Who needs what treatment? Not all cancers are created equally, and similarly not all patients...
The Association for Clinical Oncology (the Association) launched the ASCO Patient-Centered Cancer Care Certification, a new pilot that certifies outpatient oncology group practices and health systems that meet a single set of comprehensive, expert-backed standards for patient-centered care...
2021 marks the 20th year of collaboration between ASCO; Conquer Cancer®, the ASCO Foundation; and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation® (BCRF). BCRF’s pivotal support during the past 2 decades has been critical to both organizations’ shared achievements in funding breakthroughs in breast cancer...
As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Marcia S. Brose, MD, Abramson Cancer Center, University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues, the phase III COSMIC-311 trial has shown that cabozantinib produced a numerically higher objective response rate and significantly prolonged progression-free survival vs...
Neoadjuvant atezolizumab combined with pemetrexed and cisplatin, with maintenance atezolizumab, proved to be safe and feasible, offering a hint of benefit in patients with resectable pleural mesothelioma, in a small multicenter study presented at the International Association for the Study of Lung...
Charles M. Rudin, MD, PhD, Hassenfeld Professor and Chief of the Thoracic Oncology Service, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, commented that although ATLANTIS1 “unfortunately joins the ranks of negative phase III studies in patients with recurrent small cell lung cancer,” there are “some...
As a second-line treatment for patients with small cell lung cancer, lurbinectedin plus doxorubicin failed to improve overall survival in the multicenter ATLANTIS trial but did provide other benefits, including better tolerability, researchers reported at the 2021 World Conference on Lung Cancer,...
The Wistar Institute has announced the appointment of Italo Tempera, PhD, as Associate Director for Cancer Research Career Enhancement at the Institute’s Cancer Center. Dr. Tempera, who is also Associate Professor in the Gene Expression & Regulation Program, will lead the educational mission of ...
The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) has named Michael Boyer, MBBS, FRACP, PhD, as the 2021 recipient of the Adi F. Gazdar IASLC Merit Award. The announcement was made during the IASLC 2021 World Conference on Lung Cancer. In 2019, the IASLC Board of Directors...
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) has appointed Tracy Gosselin, PhD, RN, AOCN, NEA-BC, FAAN, as Senior Vice President, Chief Nurse Executive, and Chair of Nursing, effective November 2021. Dr. Gosselin currently serves as Chief Nursing & Patient Care Services Officer at Duke...
For years, scientists at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center and the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center have devoted themselves to research to better understand ovarian cancer. Now, teams of researchers from these two leading centers are combining efforts after together ...
“The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is currently examining pembrolizumab for the adjuvant treatment of stage IIB and IIC melanoma; if approved, we would be introducing immunotherapy earlier in the patient journey,” commented invited discussant Omid Hamid, MD (@OmidHamidMD), who was an...
Adjuvant pembrolizumab reduced the risk of recurrence in adults and children older than age 12 with high-risk stage II (AJCC 8th edition, stage IIB/IIC) melanoma vs placebo, according to a late-breaking interim analysis of the phase III KEYNOTE-716 trial, presented during the European Society for...
“The standard of care [in advanced cervical cancer] has been the addition of bevacizumab to platinum-based chemotherapy since 2014. Even with the addition of bevacizumab, we still need to do better. There is a substantial unmet need for new therapies,” said invited discussant Mansoor Raza Mirza,...
The addition of pembrolizumab to chemotherapy prolonged survival in recurrent, persistent, or metastatic cervical cancer, according to the results of the first interim analysis of the KEYNOTE-826 trial, presented at a Presidential Symposium during the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO)...
Monica Arnedos, MD, PhD, Head of the Breast Cancer Research Program at the Institut Bergonié, Bordeaux, France, commented on the study findings on extended treatment with letrozole. “We cannot ignore the results of the GIM4 trial.1 It provides additional strong evidence to support extended...
In an exploratory analysis of the pivotal phase III IMpower010 trial in stage II–IIIA non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), continued treatment with the monoclonal antibody atezolizumab after surgery and chemotherapy improved disease-free survival regardless of the type of surgery or chemotherapy...
Shanu Modi, MD, of the Breast Medicine Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, called the DESTINY-Breast03 results,1 which showed a highly significant benefit for fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki (T-DXd) over trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1), “unprecedented.” She suggested they...
The antibody-drug conjugate fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki (T-DXd) may become a new option as a second-line treatment of patients with HER2-positive unresectable or metastatic breast cancer, based on results from the global phase III DESTINY-Breast03 trial. These findings were presented by Javier...
Over the past month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued several regulatory decisions for novel treatments for patients with cancer. Priority Review for Relatlimab and Nivolumab Fixed-Dose Combination in Unresectable or Metastatic Melanoma The FDA accepted for Priority Review the...
Black patients with prostate cancer who were treated with the androgen receptor inhibitor darolutamide had clinical outcomes similar to those observed in the overall clinical trial population, according to results from the phase III ARAMIS trial presented by Neal Shore, MD, at the 14th AACR...
On October 5, Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, announced his decision to end his tenure as Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by the end of the year. Dr. Collins is the longest-serving presidentially appointed NIH Director, having served three U.S. presidents over more than 12 years....
In a study reported in JAMA Network Open, Kuzuu et al found that the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan was associated with reduced rates of new diagnoses, as well as reduced rates of diagnosis at earlier stages, for some gastrointestinal cancers. Study Details The retrospective cohort study included data...
Today’s life-saving chemotherapeutics originated from the vision and indefatigable work of pioneers in the field whose unwavering vision challenged the status quo. One such pioneer was Franco M. Muggia, MD, who, in a career lasting more than 50 years, had a hand in the development of some of the...
“It is important to note that a paper on managing individuals with germline variants in PALB2 was published in the same issue of Genetics in Medicine as an article on reporting secondary findings in clinical exome and genome sequencing,”1,2 Douglas R. Stewart, MD, told The ASCO Post. “PALB2 is a...
PALB2 germline pathogenic variants are associated with a substantially increased risk for breast cancer and a smaller increased risk for pancreatic and ovarian cancers, warranting enhanced surveillance and the option of risk-reducing interventions, according to a global team of cancer genetic...
Since my small cell lung cancer diagnosis in 2010, I’ve had to overcome not just the distress of having a life-threatening disease, but the stigma attached to it as well. I admit that I was a smoker. I was attracted to smoking when I was 16 and saw how “cool” people looked smoking in television and ...
“I vividly remember watching television with my older sister, Suzy, and marveling at President Nixon’s signing of the National Cancer Act in December 1971, and thinking ‘for me, this was like a man going to the moon,’” writes Nancy G. Brinker in the foreword to the recently published Centers of the ...
Ensuring equitable cancer care for every patient, everywhere has been embedded into ASCO’s mission statement since the Society’s inception nearly 60 years ago. Nevertheless, events of the past year, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has disproportionally impacted minority communities, ...
In a letter to the editor in The New England Journal of Medicine, Jocelyn Keehner, MD, of the University of California San Diego Health (UCSDH), and colleagues describe a marked resurgence of COVID-19 infections among fully vaccinated workers in the UCSDH workforce in July 2021.1 The resurgence...
For aggressive B-cell lymphomas, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy saves lives, but relapse remains common, and a second-line standard of care is lacking. During the 2021 Pan Pacific Lymphoma Conference, Grzegorz (Greg) S. Nowakowski, MD, Professor of Medicine and Oncology, Lymphoma...
Collectively, Black Americans have the highest death rate and shortest survival of any racial/ethnic group in the United States for most cancers; Black men also have the highest cancer incidence rate. Despite improvements in survival disparities between Black and White Americans in specific cancers ...
In a phase II trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Juan W. Valle, MD, and colleagues found that no progression-free survival benefit was achieved with the addition of either the VEGFR2 inhibitor ramucirumab or the MEK inhibitor merestinib to first-line cisplatin/gemcitabine chemotherapy in...
Gastrointestinal oncologist Emily K. Bergsland, MD, was born and spent her formative years in La Crosse, Wisconsin, situated on the banks of the Mississippi River. “No one in my family was in the medical field; however, both my parents valued higher education. In fact, when I was in high school, my ...
Several recent investigations have led to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of novel antiandrogens to treat nonmetastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. Yet, this work has not addressed the treatment of nonmetastatic hormone-sensitive biochemically recurrent prostate...
In a single-center study reported in JAMA Oncology, Daneng Li, MD, and colleagues found that a geriatric assessment–driven intervention (GAIN) was associated with a reduced incidence of grade ≥ 3 adverse events and a higher frequency of completion of advance directives vs standard of care among...
In the phase III IMpower010 trial reported in The Lancet, Enriqueta Felip, MD, and colleagues found that the use of adjuvant atezolizumab after adjuvant platinum-based chemotherapy significantly improved disease-free survival vs best supportive care in patients with resected stage II to IIIA...