Research published by Kachuri et al in the American Journal of Human Genetics reveals that children born with a genetic predisposition to produce more lymphocytes—particularly in relation to other types of white blood cells—may be at a higher risk of developing acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL)....
In this installment of The ASCO Post’s Global Oncology series, Guest Editor Chandrakanth Are, MBBS, MBA, FRCS, FACS, spoke with Gregorio Jaimovich, MD, Director of the Bone Marrow Transplant Program at Favaloro University Hospital in Buenos Aires. Distinguished expert on radiation therapy and bone...
On September 10, 2021, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) released the following statement: “I wanted to share an update about my health. In February of this year, doctors at Mayo Clinic found small white spots called calcifications during a routine mammogram. After this was discovered, I had a biopsy...
By the time my non–small cell lung cancer was diagnosed in 2004, it had already reached stage IIIB, and I was told there was little that could be done for me. I was 56, a wife, the mother of 3 children, and at the peak of my career as president of Olympian Oil. Although my aunt, brother, and...
Although the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has identified adolescents and young adults (AYAs) with cancer as a distinct patient population from children and older adults with the disease, research into the diagnosis, treatment, and survivorship specific to this patient population has not kept...
Adjuvant pembrolizumab reduced the risk of disease recurrence in adults and children aged 12 years and older with high-risk stage II melanoma vs placebo, according to a late-breaking interim analysis of the phase III KEYNOTE-716 trial presented by Jason J. Luke, MD, and colleagues at the European...
A cancer diagnosis can abruptly and durably alter the course of daily life—not just for the person diagnosed but also for family members. New research presented by Sinen Korbi, MD, and colleagues at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2021 examined the coping mechanisms of...
A study investigating the association between state Medicaid income eligibility limits and long-term survival among newly diagnosed patients with cancer has found that patients living in states with lower Medicaid income eligibility limits had worse long-term survival compared with patients living ...
With completion of the Human Genome Project, medicine hit a turning point that enabled scientists to approach genetic diseases like cancer with new tools such as disruptive technologies like CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) gene editing. Progress in this novel...
In a Global Registry of COVID-19 in Childhood Cancer cohort study reported in The Lancet Oncology, Mukkada et al found that approximately one-fifth of children with cancer infected with COVID-19 worldwide had severe illness, with an associated mortality rate exceeding that reported in the general...
Infants whose mothers were obese during pregnancy may have a heightened risk of developing colorectal cancer later in life, according to new research published by Murphy et al in the journal Gut. Obesity is already a well-established risk factor for colorectal cancer, and several studies suggest...
In a Canadian study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Cullinan et al found that the McGill Interactive Pediatric OncoGenetic Guidelines (MIPOGG) tool provided predictive value for risk of subsequent malignant neoplasms in childhood cancer survivors beyond risk associated with treatment...
A new study found that incidence rates for malignant brain and other central nervous system (CNS) tumors declined by 0.8% annually during 2008 through 2017 in the United States for all ages combined. The decline was driven by trends in adults, whereas rates have slightly increased by 0.5% to 0.7%...
In this installment of the Living a Full Life series, guest editor Jame Abraham, MD, spoke with Pamela Kunz, MD, Director, Center for Gastrointestinal Cancers at Smilow Cancer Hospital and Yale Cancer Center. Dr. Kunz is an international leader in the clinical care of patients with neuroendocrine...
Recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Priority Review to an agent for the prevention of acute graft-vs-host disease; Breakthrough Therapy designation to an anti–PD-1 monoclonal antibody for the treatment of metastatic nasopharyngeal carcinoma; and Fast Track designation to a ...
Outcomes in adults with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) are almost rivaling those in pediatric ALL, thanks to the benefits achieved by incorporating blinatumomab and inotuzumab into chemotherapy regimens. New ways of administering the chemotherapy component are also increasing tolerability and...
In a study published by Magnum et al in JAMA Oncology, researchers reported on how two separate DNA changes appear to predict aggressive childhood leukemias when they occur in combination. The team evaluated tumor characteristics of more than 1,300 pediatric patients with B-cell acute lymphoblastic ...
In recent years, the gut microbiome has garnered considerable attention as a scientific field, with far-reaching potential for clinical good. The trillions of microorganisms that inhabit the digestive tract form an incredibly complex community, which participates in countless interactions with its...
In a European phase II trial (VIT-0910) reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Defachelles et al found that the combination of vincristine/irinotecan with vs without temozolomide produced better outcomes—albeit with increased toxicity—in children and adults with relapsed or refractory...
Adolescent and young adult (AYA) patients with cancer have not seen the same improvements in survival over the years as their pediatric and older adult counterparts. Some evidence has suggested that this may in part be a result of low AYA participation in clinical trials, limiting advances in...
In a European platform trial (AcSé-ESMART) reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Bautista et al found evidence of activity of the CDK4/6 inhibitor ribociclib plus the mTOR inhibitor everolimus in a population of children with recurrent or refractory malignancies enriched for alterations in...
I first noticed blood in my stool when I was in the 8th grade. My mom and I did an Internet search and were relieved to find that the cause was most likely nothing more serious than hemorrhoids, so I put the problem out of my mind. I played volleyball and had an active social life, and the...
In this installment of The ASCO Post’s Global Oncology series, Guest Editor Chandrakanth Are, MBBS, MBA, FRCS, FACS, spoke with Ashraf Zaghloul, MD, DrPH, Professor at the National Cancer Institute of Egypt and President of the Egyptian Society of Surgical Oncology. Dr. Zaghloul was born in 1956 in ...
In a Chinese phase III trial (CCCG-ALL-2015) reported in The Lancet Oncology, Yang et al found that 1 year of maintenance therapy with pulsed vincristine and dexamethasone was noninferior to 2 years in low-risk pediatric patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia and was borderline inferior in...
In a Children’s Oncology Group (COG) phase III trial reported in JAMA Oncology, Leary et al found that the addition of carboplatin to radiotherapy in pediatric patients with newly diagnosed high-risk medulloblastoma improved event-free survival in the group 3 molecular subgroup but not in others....
According to George W. Sledge, Jr, MD, FASCO, Professor of Medicine in the Division of Oncology at Stanford University Medical Center, by the beginning of the next decade, clinicians will be aided by the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in many facets of care and by the approval of a wave of new ...
Clinical social worker, grief expert, and university dean Erica Sirrine, PhD, has been named Director of Social Work at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. For the past 14 years, Dr. Sirrine has worked in higher education, most recently serving as Dean of the College of Behavioral and Social...
The Division of Oncology at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) has appointed Sarah Tasian, MD, as Chief of the Section of Hematologic Malignancies. Dr. Tasian succeeds Richard Aplenc, MD, PhD, MSCE, who served in this role for 13 years. Dr. Tasian will oversee a group of faculty,...
Woe to the child who tastes salty from a kiss on the brow” was a forbidding prophecy from Medieval Europe, presaging unknown disease. Today, we know that salty skin is a telltale sign of cystic fibrosis in children, a disease that eluded medical identification until 1938, when an American...
Targeting mutations appears to be bearing fruit in the treatment of some difficult-to-treat tumors. For instance, in one study of adult-onset neuroblastoma, targeting ALK mutations in ALK-positive tumors demonstrated activity, even in patients who had not responded to their first ALK inhibitor. Of...
Evidence shows that early detection and treatment of cancer can significantly improve health outcomes. However, women in Mississippi—particularly in underserved populations—experience high rates of late-stage cancer diagnoses. A report published by Michelle Williams, PhD, and colleagues in the...
Locoregional delivery of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells has resulted in objective responses in adults with glioblastoma, but the approach has not been evaluated in pediatric patients with brain and central nervous system tumors. The innovative, ongoing phase I BrainChild-01 trial is...
In a retrospective cohort study reported in a research letter in JAMA Surgery, Stokes et al found that risk of minor bleeding events during central venous catheter placement in pediatric patients with cancer was significantly increased among those with platelet counts < 50 × 103/μL at the time...
Pediatric melanoma is a rare disease, with only around 400 cases diagnosed in the United States every year. To better understand this disease and how best to treat it, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists created a registry called Molecular Analysis of Childhood MELanocytic Tumors...
India has witnessed a major paradigm shift in the field of breast cancer and its management over the past 4 decades. The discipline of medical oncology has evolved exponentially over this period—a growth that few other scientific disciplines have experienced. Interventions at the individual,...
Although we are just halfway through 2021, the outlook for improvements in global cancer trends looks grim. According to new estimates by the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s Global Cancer Observatory, the global cancer burden rose to 19.3 million cases and 10 million deaths in 2020...
Study findings presented by Perrott et al at the ESMO World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer (Abstract SO-25) showed that the use of antibiotics may be linked to colon tumor formation across all patient age groups, especially in those younger than 50 years. These results raise fresh concerns...
Overall cancer death rates continue to decline in men and women for all racial and ethnic groups in the United States, according to the latest Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer. During 2001 to 2018, declines in lung cancer death rates accelerated, and death rates for melanoma...
A new study has found evidence of the adverse effects the COVID-19 pandemic had on cancer detection and surgical treatments. The study, published by Robin Yabroff, PhD, MBA, and colleagues in JNCI: The Journal of the National Cancer Institute, found a 10.2% decline in real-time electronic pathology ...
In a pilot study reported by Myers et al in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, a humanized CD19-targeted chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell product developed by the investigators (huCART19) was found to produce durable remissions and prolonged CAR T-cell persistence in CAR-naive and CAR-exposed...
On June 30, 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved asparaginase Erwinia chrysanthemi (recombinant)-rywn (Rylaze) as a component of a multiagent chemotherapeutic regimen for the treatment of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and lymphoblastic lymphoma in adult and pediatric...
Although death rates for adolescent and young adults (AYAs) with cancer have been dropping 0.8% a year from 2009 to 2018, cancer remains a leading disease-related cause of death among this patient population. This year, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) estimates that 88,260 AYAs, defined by the...
Female gynecologic oncologists have reported in a survey that having a department chair of the same gender is no buffer against gender harassment or discrimination in the workplace. The information comes from a survey of the “Women of Gynecologic Oncology” Facebook group and was reported in March...
In 2016, 2 years before I was diagnosed with stage III estrogen and progesterone receptor–positive, HER2-negative, invasive ductal carcinoma in situ in my left breast, I had felt a mass in my right breast that turned out to be a benign fibroid. When I felt a mass in my left breast one morning while ...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Jeff M. Michalski, MBA, MD, and colleagues, the Children’s Oncology Group noninferiority phase III ACNS0331 trial has shown no decrease in event-free survival with reduced radiation boost volume in patients with newly diagnosed, average-risk...
New research has uncovered substantial differences in the rates of childhood cancers when considering a single year of age rather than grouping several years together. The study, published by Marcotte et al in the journal Cancer, also found that minority children seem to have different risks than...
By now, most health-care workers have been vaccinated against COVID-19.* Physical immunity would appear to last for at least 6 months and probably longer. The physical pandemic for most oncologists is declining, with an end in sight. We are protected from the serious physical consequences of...
In a letter recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine and reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post, Rousseau and colleagues reported data on the spectrum of benefit from immune checkpoint blockade in hypermutated tumors.1 Indeed, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently...
The Children’s Cancer Cause is now accepting applications for its 2021 Survivorship Champion’s Prize. The annual award was established in 2020 to recognize a group, program, or institution making significant advances in programs and services to provide lifelong health maintenance for survivors of...
“I want to make very clear that radiation is not the enemy,” Monika Metzger, MD, MSc, emphasized in discussing a study she led on the integration of brentuximab vedotin into the front-line treatment of pediatric patients with high-risk Hodgkin lymphoma. The study yielded excellent results while...