Far from being hobbled by fears of COVID-19, patients with lung cancer actually showed less depression and anxiety during the pandemic than their healthy peers, according to results from a new study by Arrato et al published in JNCCN–Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. Researchers ...
ASCO has published updated guidance on the use of adjuvant therapy in the management of stage II colon cancer, providing clinicians with a newer evidence-based framework that can be used in shared decision-making with patients.1 Need for Updated Guidance “How to approach patients with stage II...
A new ASCO guideline provides key recommendations for the evaluation and management of stage III non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Recommendations made by the ASCO expert panel cover evaluation and staging of NSCLC, neoadjuvant and adjuvant therapies, and the management of unresectable ...
I was honored to contribute a chapter on the cancer care delivery system and how to improve it for the book A New Deal for Cancer: Lessons From a 50 Year War, edited by Abbe R. Gluck and Charles Fuchs, MD, MPH (Public Affairs, 2021). The book chronicles what has been accomplished in the 50 years...
The Russian Federation is the largest country in the world, extending from Eastern Europe to Northern Asia and the Pacific Ocean. The population of more than 140 million people is unevenly distributed across the country.1 As a result, Russia has high spatial inequality in terms of accessibility of...
As reported by Kalinsky et al and summarized in this issue of The ASCO Post, an interim analysis of the phase III RxPONDER trial showed that the addition of adjuvant chemotherapy to endocrine therapy improved invasive disease–free survival among premenopausal—but not postmenopausal—women with...
In an interim analysis of a phase III trial (RxPONDER) reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Kevin Kalinsky, MD, MS, of Winship Cancer Institute, and colleagues found that the addition of adjuvant chemotherapy to endocrine therapy improved invasive disease–free survival among...
The addition of metformin, a drug commonly used to treat type 2 diabetes, to standard adjuvant treatment failed to improve invasive disease–free survival or overall survival for hormone receptor–positive or –negative breast cancer, according to the results of a large landmark trial led by the...
Jane N. Winter, MD, a highly regarded lymphoma expert, will serve as President of the American Society of Hematology (ASH) for a year-long term through December 2022. Dr. Winter is Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology/Oncology, a member of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer...
Jeffrey M. Farma, MD, FACS, Chief of the Division of General Surgery and Co-Director of the Melanoma and Skin Cancer Program at Fox Chase Cancer Center, has been elected a member-at-large for the Society of University Surgeons. According to the society, the member-at-large position is an important...
Jaye Gardiner, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at Fox Chase Cancer Center, has received an inaugural Black in Cancer postdoctoral fellowship, which is funded by Emerald Foundation Inc. Dr. Gardiner will receive $75,000 annually for 3 years, which will fund her research into pancreatic ductal...
Angela DeMichele, MD, MSCE, the Alan and Jill Miller Professor in Breast Cancer Excellence at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, commented on NIMBUS1 for The ASCO Post. She said obtaining information on tumor mutational burden is simple, as it is part ...
Although bone marrow transplantation is routinely employed in the United States and other wealthy nations, this costly life-saving procedure has struggled to gain a foothold in many low- to moderate-income countries, where resources are triaged to make the best use of precious health-care funding. ...
Patients with advanced HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer and high tumor mutational burden achieved responses—often durable—from treatment with the immunotherapy doublet of nivolumab and ipilimumab, according to results of the phase II NIMBUS trial reported at the 2021 San Antonio Breast Cancer ...
The start of January 2014 was filled with excitement. I was undergoing fertility treatments to have a second child and was living my professional dream. I was a network news anchor and medical news reporter for a national broadcast network. Although I was exhausted from my grueling early morning...
Datopotamab deruxtecan, an antibody-drug conjugate directed against trophoblast cell surface antigen-2 (Trop-2), is showing promise as a treatment for relapsed or refractory advanced triple-negative breast cancer, according to early findings from the phase I TROPION-PanTumor01 trial presented...
Invited discussant Anne Blaes, MD, of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, emphasized the main takeaway finding of the combined updated analysis of the SOFT and TEXT trials. “In early-stage estrogen receptor–positive breast cancer, premenopausal women who don’t require chemotherapy do very...
Guest Editor’s Note: Mindfulness has gained immense popularity in recent years. Growing evidence suggests the benefits of mindfulness-based practices, which include concentration meditation and guided imagery, for managing symptoms associated with cancer and its treatments. In this article,...
The benefits of ovarian function suppression were sustained long term for premenopausal women with hormone receptor–positive breast cancer, according to updates from SOFT and TEXT, two randomized, controlled trials, presented at the 2021 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.1 A separate large...
The discussant of KEYNOTE-522 at the 2021 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, Hope S. Rugo, MD, FASCO, Professor of Medicine and Director of Breast Oncology and Clinical Trials Education at the University of California San Francisco Comprehensive Cancer Center, commented: “We are clearly making...
On December 15, 2021, abatacept, a selective T-cell costimulation modulator, was approved for prophylaxis of acute graft-vs-host disease in combination with a calcineurin inhibitor (eg, cyclosporine, tacrolimus) and methotrexate in adults and pediatric patients aged ≥ 2 years undergoing...
Joshua Brody, MD, Director of the CLL/Lymphoma Immunotherapy Program, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, who was not involved in these trials, commented: “CLL is an extremely prevalent disease affecting nearly 200,000 patients in the United States. Most patient do not require...
Two different trials presented at the 2021 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition found that fixed-duration treatment with ibrutinib and venetoclax achieved deep and sustained undetectable measurable residual disease (MRD) status when used as first-line therapy for...
Anthony El-Khoueiry, MD, Member of the Section of Gastrointestinal Cancers, Director of the phase I program, and Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California and USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, said the findings of the...
Patients with advanced, unresectable hepatocellular carcinoma may be gaining another first-line treatment option. In the global phase III HIMALAYA trial, a single priming dose of tremelimumab plus regular-interval durvalumab significantly improved overall survival, according to Ghassan K....
Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) and University of Utah Health welcome Amit Maity, MD, PhD. Dr. Maity will serve as Professor and Chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology for the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine at the University of Utah. Dr. Maity is a physician-scientist who currently...
For the first time, a phase III study has shown an overall survival benefit for upfront treatment using immunotherapy plus chemotherapy in advanced biliary tract cancer. In the TOPAZ-1 trial, the addition of the anti–PD-L1 agent durvalumab to gemcitabine plus cisplatin significantly improved...
On February 2, 2022, City of Hope announced that it has completed its previously announced acquisition of Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA), a network of oncology hospitals and outpatient care centers across the United States. City of Hope, in Duarte, California, now has expanded its...
Regulations that are developed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) must have some shelf-life before revisions are considered. The FDA has several mechanisms to provide patients with more rapid access to medicines. One such pathway is accelerated approval. Backward Glance at Accelerated...
In a study reported in JACC: CardioOncology, Yaogang Wang, PhD, of the School of Public Health, Tianjin Medical University, China, and colleagues found that fulfillment of more components of a healthy lifestyle was associated with a reduced risk of developing cancer in a baseline cancer-free cohort ...
Over the past 7 years, the introduction of combined endocrine therapy with cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) 4/6 inhibitors resulted in a dramatic improvement in outcomes for patients with metastatic, hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative breast cancer. Early attempts to modulate the cell cycle with ...
An updated analysis of the phase III CANDOR study—recently reported by Usmani et al and summarized in this issue of The ASCO Post—confirmed a significant progression-free survival benefit for the combination of daratumumab, carfilzomib, and dexamethasone (KdD) over carfilzomib and dexamethasone...
In an updated analysis of the pivotal phase III CANDOR trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Saad Z. Usmani, MD, of Levine Cancer Institute/Atrium Health, and colleagues found that the addition of daratumumab to carfilzomib and dexamethasone (KdD) continued to show a large progression-free...
New research published by Shulman et al in JNCCN—Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network confirmed that mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 are just as safe for people with cancer as they are for cancer-free individuals. Researchers from a single institution tracked short-term side effects from ...
In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Pfob et al developed a machine learning algorithm–based (intelligent) vacuum-assisted biopsy model that could identify patients with pathologic complete response (ypT0 and ypN0) to neoadjuvant therapy for breast cancer who may be able to...
Mirek Fatyga, PhD, of Mayo Clinic Arizona, discusses his findings on overall survival in patients with locally advanced non–small cell lung cancer who are treated with stereotactic body radiotherapy or conventionally fractionated radiotherapy. He notes that a high dose of > 50 Gy to the...
In an interim analysis of the Chinese phase III GEMSTONE-301 study reported in The Lancet Oncology, Zhou et al found that the PD-L1 inhibitor sugemalimab prolonged progression-free survival vs placebo in patients with locally advanced unresectable stage III non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC)...
New findings from researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center published by Nguyen et al in Cell support an emerging framework in cancer science that views metastasis as not primarily driven by genetic mutations, but rather, by epigenetic changes that occur in cancer cells because of their ...
A study published by David Gershenson, MD, and colleagues in The Lancet reported that the MEK inhibitor trametinib reduced the risk of disease progression or death by 52% compared to standard-of-care therapies in low-grade serous ovarian carcinoma. The international, multicenter phase II/III trial...
Rona Yaeger, MD, Associate Attending Physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, offered her thoughts on the findings of Morris et al for the combination regimen of encorafenib, cetuximab, and nivolumab in patients with microsatellite-stable BRAF V600E–mutated metastatic...
The combination of the BRAF inhibitor encorafenib with cetuximab and nivolumab produced responses in 50% of patients and disease control in 96% of patients with microsatellite-stable BRAF V600E–mutated metastatic colorectal cancer in a phase I/II trial reported at the 2022 ASCO Gastrointestinal...
For the treatment of metastatic colorectal cancer in patients unfit for intensive chemotherapy, trifluridine/tipiracil plus bevacizumab as first-line therapy was no more effective than capecitabine plus bevacizumab, investigators from the phase III SOLSTICE trial reported in a European Society for...
In the Chinese phase II PERMEATE trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Yan et al found that the combination of the pan-HER receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitor pyrotinib plus capecitabine produced high intracranial response rates in women with HER2-positive breast cancer and brain metastases,...
As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine by Doki et al, the phase III CheckMate 648 trial has shown improved overall survival with nivolumab combined with chemotherapy or ipilimumab vs chemotherapy alone in patients with previously untreated advanced esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, in ...
Pranshu Mohindra, MD, MBBS, of the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the Maryland Proton Treatment Center, discusses the largest series to date reporting outcomes for patients with non–small cell lung cancer who were treated with intensity-modulated proton therapy–based reirradiation....
In a National Institutes of Health study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Zacharakis et al found that treatment with autologous tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) reactive to mutations in metastatic lesions produced responses in patients with metastatic breast cancer. Study Details...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is investigating a possible increased risk of death associated with umbralisib (Ukoniq), a kinase inhibitor including PI3K-delta and CK1-epsilon, approved to treat marginal zone and follicular lymphomas. The FDA determined that initial findings from the...
A disease control rate of 100% was achieved in gastrointestinal cancers treated with the KRAS G12C inhibitor adagrasib in the phase II KRYSTAL-1 trial, presented at the 2022 ASCO Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium.1 The population included primarily those with pancreatic cancer; other noncolorectal ...
Financial assistance may be available for some individuals with cancer from CancerCare, a nonprofit organization helping people cope with and manage the emotional and practical challenges of cancer. Two assistance programs tailored to specific individuals are available to meet financial challenges...
In a German study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Baum et al found that risk-standardized mortality rates may be a better-quality proxy for complex oncologic surgeries than hospital volume. As stated by the investigators, “Despite a long-known association between annual hospital...