Charu Aggarwal, MD, MPH, Leslye M. Heisler Assistant Professor for Lung Cancer Excellence at the Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, underscored the paucity of treatment options for metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma. “Even though pembrolizumab is...
The lymphomas are an incredibly complex assemblage of neoplastic diseases. They are not one disease, and, at least based on the World Health Organization (WHO) Classification of Tumors published in 2017, they represent a collection of approximately 80 different malignancies, a number that will...
The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) is working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to advance the FDA’s public health initiative called Project Renewal. Launched in October 2018 by the FDA’s Oncology Center for Excellence (OCE), Project Renewal has an ambitious goal to...
A study showing that statins used alone or in combination with metformin was associated with reduced prostate cancer mortality and all-cause mortality among men with high-risk prostate cancer may raise more questions about these already commonly used drugs.1 “Metformin is the first-line therapy for ...
The ASCO Post is pleased to reproduce installments of 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, historical...
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has launched the $1 million Technology Accelerator Challenge to spur the design and development of noninvasive, handheld, digital technologies to detect, diagnose, and guide therapies for diseases with high global and public health impact. The challenge is...
Joseph C. Alvarnas, MD, of the City of Hope National Medical Center, discusses the patients with cancer who are at an increased risk for developing serious complications from COVID-19, including those receiving bone marrow or stem cell transplants and CAR-T cell therapy, and what they can do to...
How confident should oncologists be that their patients feel adequately informed about the adverse effects of their cancer treatment? A recent study by Shaverdian et al,1 reported in the Journal of Oncology Practice and reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post, found that 18% of 403 patients felt...
The microbiome—and the foods that feed it—is emerging as an important determinant of a patient’s response to immunotherapy. Much of the research in this area comes from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, as described at the 2020 ASCO-SITC Clinical Immuno-Oncology Symposium by...
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. In this installment, Ting Bao, MD, DABMA, MS, and Jyothirmai Gubili, MS, focus on the Budwig...
Vitamin D is a steroid-like hormone involved primarily in human calcium homeostasis. Obtained through sun exposure as well as food and dietary supplements,1 vitamin D in humans is metabolized in the liver and kidneys to its active form, 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D (1,25[OH]2D).2 Other cell types,...
The members of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) have elected David A. Tuveson, MD, PhD, FAACR, as their President-Elect for 2020–2021. He will officially become President-Elect on April 29, 2020, during the AACR’s Business Meeting of Members. He will assume the presidency in...
April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. —T.S. Eliot, The Burial of the Dead, The Waste Land, 1922 I started...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the first diagnostic test with a home collection option for COVID-19. Specifically, the FDA re-issued the emergency use authorization (EUA) for the Laboratory Corporation of America (LabCorp) COVID-19 RT-PCR Test to permit testing of samples...
Patients may experience a greater occurrence of infections in the years preceding a cancer diagnosis, according to results from a study published by Inaida et al in Cancer Immunology Research. “Cancer can develop in an inflammatory environment caused by infections, immunity disruption, exposure to...
Patients with cancer and those who have recently completed treatment are finding it challenging to get necessary health care in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and many are experiencing financial stress trying to afford care in an increasingly difficult economic environment. Delays in Care...
The coronavirus pandemic is being compared to a battlefield, with health-care workers seen as the front-line soldiers in the war against the disease. There is certainly truth to that, insofar as doctors and nurses in many countries now face an unprecedented workload in saving lives, along with the...
A high-resolution, three-dimensional imaging technique, when combined with quantitative measurement of tissue elasticity, could accurately detect cancer within the resected margins of surgical specimens taken from patients undergoing breast-conserving surgery, according to a study published by...
This week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a statement encouraging patients who have fully recovered from COVID-19 for at least 2 weeks to donate plasma, in order to ramp up supply of convalescent plasma for treatment of infected individuals. The agency also announced that spun...
In a study reported in JCO Oncology Practice, Holmes et al found that a program instituted at the University of Vermont Medical Center was successful in improving venous thromboembolism (VTE) risk assessment, patient education, and rates of prophylaxis use in patients initiating anticancer...
The American Society of Breast Surgeons (ASBrS), the National Accreditation Program for Breast Centers (NAPBC), the National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®), the Commission on Cancer (CoC) of the American College of Surgeons, and the American College of Radiology (ACR) have released new joint ...
Aspirin may be associated with a reduction in the risk of developing several cancers of the digestive tract. The largest and most comprehensive analysis to date of the link between aspirin and digestive tract cancers, published by Bosetti et al in Annals of Oncology, found reductions in the risk of ...
In an article published in The Oncologist, an international collaborative group outlined issues and potential management approaches for the treatment of patients with cancer during the COVID-19 pandemic. Key issues facing cancer treatment and some of the potential measures for addressing these...
The rapid spread of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has dramatically disrupted societal life within a very short time. Patients with cancer in particular can be affected by delays in routine medical care in addition to experiencing heightened anxiety and stress associated with the threat...
The spread of COVID-19 continues to have a dramatic impact around the world, disrupting social lives and the delivery of oncologic treatments to patients with cancer. Even under “normal” circumstances, health-care professionals, including those in oncology, are prone to occupational stress....
A recently published article by Schatz et al offers new clarity around the use of prescription opioids in pain management for people with a diagnosis or history of cancer and chronic pain. The joint publication, which appeared in both JNCCN—Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network and...
Patients with localized colon cancer may benefit from a short course of neoadjuvant immunotherapy, according to findings from the exploratory phase II NICHE study published by Myriam Chalabi, MD, and colleagues in Nature Medicine. Study Results Forty patients with two colon cancer subtypes—either ...
ASCO has released a set of recommendations to support the oncology community as health-care institutions across the United States face potentially difficult decisions around the allocation of scarce health-care resources during the COVID-19 pandemic. In some geographic areas, the ongoing crisis is...
On April 10, ASCO launched the ASCO Survey on COVID-19 in Oncology Registry (ASCO Registry) to help the entire cancer community learn about the pattern of symptoms and severity of COVID-19 among patients with cancer, as well as how COVID-19 infections impact the delivery of cancer care and patient...
The National Comprehensive Cancer Network’s® (NCCN®) Best Practices Committee has published a preprint article in JNCCN—Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network detailing their recommendations for keeping patients with cancer, as well as their caregivers and health-care staff, as safe...
On April 10, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved selumetinib (Koselugo) for pediatric patients aged 2 years and older with neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) who have symptomatic inoperable plexiform neurofibromas. Selumetinib, a kinase inhibitor, is the first therapy approved for...
Cancer and its treatment can cause infertility in both men and women. Educate your patients about this potential side effect by giving them the ASCO Answers fact sheet Your Fertility and Cancer Treatment. This fact sheet covers: An overview of what the terms fertility and infertility mean What...
In a letter to Representatives Terri Sewell (AL), Adrian Smith (NE), Tony Cárdenas (CA), and John Shimkus (IL), the Association for Clinical Oncology conveyed its support for legislation the lawmakers introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill—H.R. 5741, or the Strengthening...
Starting January 1, 2021, there will be significant changes to the office and outpatient Evaluation and Management services Current Procedural Terminology codes (99202–99215) for both new and established patients. Practices, physicians, and staff must prepare in advance for these changes to ensure...
I have been a radiologic technologist for 47 years, so after going to the bathroom one Sunday morning in October 2018 and finding my urine had suddenly turned dark, I knew something was wrong. I wasn’t in any pain and did not have a urinary tract infection, which would explain the discoloration of...
A $12 million federal grant enabled City of Hope and collaborators to deploy a novel cloud-computing platform, making an immense amount of data from a historic 25-year study more accessible and user-friendly. The ongoing California Teachers Study, which began in 1995, has already given researchers...
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,...
An abstract presented at the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting titled “Evaluating Unconscious Bias During Speaker Introductions at an International Oncology Conference,” by Narjust Duma, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine and Thoracic Oncologist at the University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center in...
The Combined Annual Meetings of the American Society for Transplantation and Cellular Therapy (ASTCT) and the Center for International Blood & Marrow Transplant Research (CIBMTR) were held in Orlando, Florida, from February 19–23, 2020. The scientific program addressed the most timely issues in ...
Each year, The ASCO Post asks Jame Abraham, MD, FACP, Chairman of the Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Taussig Cancer Institute and Professor of Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, to offer his picks for the most important research presented at 2019 San...
Physician-scientist, Reshma Jagsi, MD, DPhil, was encouraged by her parents to become a politically active, socially conscious citizen of the world. “As a young woman, my mother traveled from Africa on a scholarship to the United States, where she attended the University of Wisconsin. It was in the ...
Treatment with antibiotics prior to immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy may confer poorer overall survival and an increased risk of colitis in patients with advanced melanoma, according to data presented at the 2020 ASCO-SITC Clinical Immuno-Oncology Symposium.1 The largest institutional...
The loosening of restrictions on genetic testing would mean that all health-care providers could help move this needle to where it should be, according to Kevin S. Hughes, MD, a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, and Medical Director of the...
The combination of the checkpoint inhibitor pembrolizumab and definitive radiation therapy appears to be a safe and feasible option for patients with locally advanced head and neck cancer who are not eligible for cisplatin, according to data presented at the 2020 Multidisciplinary Head and Neck...
Abstracts from posters that would have been presented at the National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®) 2020 Annual Conference are now available online. Although NCCN officials were compelled to postpone the conference in response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, in order to ...
Moderator of the session, Tanguy Y. Seiwert, MD, Director of the Head and Neck Cancer Oncology Disease Group and Assistant Professor of Oncology at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, underscored the “dramatically good” preclinical data supporting the use of mTOR inhibitors in advanced...
ASCO has released a new guideline for clinicians and policymakers in resource-constrained settings on treating patients with late-stage colorectal cancer.1 “Around the world, there is a huge variation in resources, and what is available to clinicians may change week to week,” said Mary D....
Although patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer typically have limited responses to immunotherapy, a subset of patients with pretreatment evidence of active T-cell responses in their tumors experienced prolonged survival following treatment with ipilimumab in a phase II...
A new prognostic tool may help to predict time to first treatment for patients with early-stage, asymptomatic chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). Researchers described what they hope will become a point-of-care resource to help improve clinical decision-making in a study published by Rossi et al in ...
William A. Wood, MD, MPH, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Oversight Group Chair for the new COVID-19 registry, talks about why it was formed, how it can help patients and providers, and how it operates and could evolve in the future. Filmed April 3, 2020.