ADJUVANT CAPECITABINE added to standard neoadjuvant chemotherapy failed to significantly improve disease-free or overall survival in patients with early triple-negative breast cancer in the large phase III CIBOMA/2004-01_GEICAM/2003-11 (CIBOMA/GEICAM) trial.1 However, extended treatment with...
In a study reported in a research letter in JAMA Internal Medicine, Goodwin et al found that only a small proportion of Medicare enrollees undergoing low-dose computed tomography (CT) screening for lung cancer had a prescreening shared decision-making session, which is mandated by the Centers for...
Personalized treatment plans may extend life expectancy for patients with early-stage kidney cancer who also have risk factors for worsening kidney disease, according to a new study published by Kang et al in Radiology. Kidney tumors are often discovered at an early stage and are frequently...
In an observational cohort study reported in JAMA Oncology, Jhawar et al found that combined modality therapy (CMT) with chemotherapy followed by radiotherapy was associated with a survival advantage vs chemotherapy alone in early-stage pediatric Hodgkin lymphoma. The authors noted that use of...
John Mendelsohn, MD, President Emeritus of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, died of glioblastoma on January 7, 2019, at his home in Houston at age 82. He was an internationally acclaimed leader in the field of medicine and scientist whose research helped pioneer a new type of...
The Global Cancer Institute recently announced the results of its Patient Navigation Program in Mexico City. The average time to referral before the program’s inception was 5 months, but the implementation of patient navigators reduced that average to 7 days. These findings were published by Yanin...
The oncology community is deeply saddened by the untimely passing of Arti Hurria, MD, FASCO, a nationally regarded expert and advocate for elderly patients with cancer. Dr. Hurria died on November 7, 2018, in a traffic accident. At the time of her tragic death, Dr. Hurria was Director of the City...
Waun Ki Hong, MD, FACP, FASCO, led numerous clinical trials showing that cisplatin-based chemotherapy and radiotherapy could effectively treat patients with cancer of the larynx while sparing their voice box. This seminal work also served as a model for organ-preservation strategies in many other...
According to a new American Cancer Society report published by Susan M. Gapstur, PhD, MPH, American Cancer Society Senior Vice President of Behavioral and Epidemiology Research, and colleages in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, the highest priority in a national cancer control plan is the...
A steady 25-year decline has resulted in a 27% drop in the overall cancer death rate in the United States between 1991 and 2016. The data come from “Cancer Statistics, 2019,” the American Cancer Society’s annual report on cancer rates and trends. The report was published by Siegel et al in CA: A...
Despite a recent study showing that patients with cancer who chose alternative therapies over conventional cancer treatment have a higher risk of death, nearly 4 in 10 Americans believe cancer can be cured by alternative remedies alone, according to the results of ASCO’s 2018 National Cancer...
Here is an update on several different studies focusing on novel treatments for patients with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma presented at the 2018 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition. Featured therapeutics include daratumumab plus lenalidomide and dexamethasone, ...
Ever since President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law on March 23, 2010, the nondiscrimination provision of the law, Section 1557, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability in certain health ...
Advances in medicine and technology are emerging faster than ever before. To harness this momentum, ASCO is convening Breakthrough: A Global Summit for Oncology Innovators, a new meeting focused on the intersection of medicine, scientific discovery, and innovations in technology. The inaugural...
ASCO and the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) published a joint analysis comparing the results of both organizations’ value frameworks in ASCO’s Journal of Clinical Oncology.1 The analysis found that the frameworks produce comparable measures of the clinical benefits of new therapies in ...
ASCO has elected Lori J. Pierce, MD, FASTRO, FASCO, a long-time member and volunteer, to serve as its President for the term beginning in June 2020. She will take office as President-Elect during the ASCO Annual Meeting in Chicago in June 2019. Six new members were also elected to the ASCO Board of ...
For the first time, four nonprofits have joined together to support a Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO Young Investigator Award (YIA). Marina Baretti, MD, postdoctoral oncology fellow at Johns Hopkins University, is the recipient of the 2018 Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO/AMMF–The...
Among African American adults undergoing liver transplant to treat hepatocellular carcinoma, patients whose organ donor was also African American lived significantly longer than those with a racially unmatched donor, report authors of a new study using national data. Their findings were published...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Reck et al, an updated analysis of the phase III KEYNOTE-024 trial indicates continued overall survival benefit of first-line pembrolizumab vs platinum-based chemotherapy in patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with a...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently issued the following new designations and clearances: Fast Track Designation for Itolizumab for the Treatment of Acute Graft-vs-Host Disease The FDA granted Fast Track designation to itolizumab for the treatment of acute graft-vs-host ...
A steady 25-year decline has resulted in a 27% drop in the overall cancer death rate in the United States between 1991 and 2016. The data come from “Cancer Statistics, 2019,” the American Cancer Society’s annual report on cancer rates and trends. The report was published in CA: A...
TO BETTER UNDERSTAND the performance characteristics of ASCO’s Value Framework Net Health Benefit Score version 2 (ASCO-NHB v2)1 and the European Society for Medical Oncology’s (ESMO’s) Magnitude of Clinical Benefit Scale version 1.1 (ESMO-MCBS v1.1),2 ASCO and ESMO undertook a joint project to...
ASCO AND THE ONCOLOGY COMMUNITY mourn the loss of ASCO Past President and former SWOG leader Charles A. Coltman, Jr, MD, FASCO, President Emeritus, Cancer Therapy & Research Center, The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Dr. Coltman died on November 28 at the age of 88....
Maria Papaleontiou, MD, whose research interests focus on the complex issues surrounding the management of thyroid cancer and thyroid disease in general, was born on Cyprus, a small island nestled in the azure waters of the Mediterranean Sea. She recently spoke with The ASCO Post about her life and ...
In a single-center phase II study reported in JAMA Oncology, Erminia Massarelli, MD, and colleagues found combining tumor-specific vaccine and nivolumab (Opdivo) showed evidence of activity in incurable human papillomavirus (HPV) 16–related cancer. The therapeutic vaccine, ISA 101, induces...
In a Dutch study reported in JAMA Surgery, Michael P.M. de Neree tot Babberich, MD, of the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam, and colleagues found that postoperative outcomes were better in patients with colon cancer, but not rectal cancer, detected...
Researchers have shown that autologous fecal microbiota transplantation may be a safe and effective way to help replenish beneficial gut bacteria in patients with cancer who require intense antibiotics during allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. Their findings were published by Ying ...
As the field of immunotherapy accelerates, so does the literature reporting on the path ahead. One of the newer books on the topic is A Cure Within: Scientists Unleashing the Immune System to Kill Cancer. It has a top-notch pedigree: the author, Neil Canavan, is a seasoned journalist with more than ...
TWO STUDIES reported in The New England Journal of Medicine1,2 showed that patients with early-stage cervical cancer had reduced disease-free and overall survival when treated with minimally invasive radical hysterectomy vs open or radical hysterectomy. The findings of these studies have been...
MINIMALLY INVASIVE radical hysterectomy for women with early-stage cervical cancer has been associated with reduced rates of disease-free and overall survival in the phase III LACC randomized noninferiority trial comparing minimally invasive and open abdominal radical hysterectomy. The results...
On November 21, 2018, venetoclax (Venclexta) was granted accelerated approval for use in combination with azacitidine or decitabine or low-dose cytarabine for the treatment of newly diagnosed acute myeloid leukemia (AML) in patients aged ≥ 75 years or who have comorbidities that preclude the use of ...
FOUR AND A HALF YEARS AGO, author Neil Canavan attended a scientific conference to learn what he could about the then-emerging field of immunotherapy for cancer. After a presentation by Zelig Eshhar, PhD, principal investigator in the Department of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science...
Injectable low–molecular-weight heparin has long been considered the standard of care for treatment of venous thromboembolism (VTE) in patients with cancer. However, low–molecular-weight heparin is costly and often disliked by patients due to injection-related discomfort and bruising....
HERE IS AN UPDATE on six different studies featured at the 2018 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition. Topics focused on novel treatments for myelofibrosis, polycythemia vera and essential thrombocythemia, as well as systemic mastocytosis. Myelofibrosis ABSTRACT...
At the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2018 Congress, important studies were presented for every cancer type. Here, The ASCO Post offers some snapshots of lung cancer studies that may inform approaches to treating this common cancer, which—despite the advances in recent years—remains...
AS REPORTED in The New England Journal of Medicine by Scott J. Antonia, MD, PhD, of H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute, and colleagues, the phase III PACIFIC trial has shown significantly improved overall survival, a coprimary endpoint, with the programmed cell death ligand 1...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) accepted a supplemental biologics license application (sBLA) and granted Priority Review for atezolizumab (Tecentriq) in combination with carboplatin and etoposide for the first-line treatment of patients with extensive-stage small cell lung cancer. The...
The European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2018 Congress featured an assortment of study findings, many with far-reaching clinical implications for the treatment of patients with various cancers. Many of these trials were covered in-depth in recent issues of The ASCO Post. Here, we present...
For patients with advanced melanoma, the concept of treating to disease progression does not always apply. With many patients responding to checkpoint inhibition for years, when can treatment be safely discontinued? This important clinical question was addressed at the European Society for Medical...
TWO STUDIES recently reported in The New England Journal of Medicine indicate that minimally invasive radical hysterectomy is associated with poorer survival outcomes than open abdominal radical hysterectomy in women with early-stage cervical cancer. As reported by Pedro T. Ramirez, MD, of The...
“Bringing pembrolizumab (Keytruda) early into therapy is a bold move,” commented the invited discussant of this trial, Charles G. Drake, MD, PhD, Professor of Oncology and Immunology at the Herbert Irving Cancer Center at Columbia University, New York. The study enrolled patients who can be cured...
As the number of opioid-related deaths continues to rise in the United States, stakeholders are struggling to make sense of the crisis. At the 2018 Palliative and Supportive Care in Oncology Symposium, two experts in the field, Charles F. von Gunten, MD, PhD, and Leslie J. Blackhall, MD,...
Immunotherapy has significantly improved the overall survival of patients with non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and is generally better tolerated than traditional chemotherapies, but the results of a retrospective study suggested that immunotherapy side effects may be more common than initially...
Does evidence of the effectiveness and safety of scalp cooling to reduce hair loss among women being treated for breast cancer mean that scalp cooling is a new standard of care? “I would suggest that it is,” stated Mikel Ross, MSN, RN, AGNP-BC, of the Breast Medicine Service, Memorial Sloan...
Overall survival (OS) was improved across all subgroups of patients with non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who received atezolizumab (Tecentriq) compared with chemotherapy, including poor prognostic factors that were evaluated in an analysis of data from the OAK trial. Additionally, this...
In interviews with The ASCO Post, Kenneth Shain, MD, PhD, Director of the Myeloma Working Group at Moffitt Cancer Center, Tampa, Florida, and Vincent Rajkumar, MD, Professor of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, commented on the findings of the MAIA trial. “The study shows that...
As reported at the recent San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium and in The New England Journal of Medicine by von Minckwitz et al, an interim analysis of the phase III KATHERINE trial has shown that adjuvant trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1; Kadcyla) improved invasive disease–free survival vs...
As reported by Mamounas et al in The Lancet Oncology, the phase III NRG Oncology/NSABP B-42 trial has shown no disease-free survival benefit with 5 years of letrozole (Femara) vs placebo after 5 years of aromatase inhibitor–based therapy in women with hormone receptor–positive...
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy is a revolutionary approach to treating hematologic malignancies. As experience with this strategy is gained, researchers are learning more about how to optimize responses, especially in patients with “immune exhaustion,” who have a suboptimal initial...
Researchers are combining chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy with ibrutinib (Imbruvica) as a means of augmenting and deepening responses in patients with relapsed or refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). Two pilot studies presented at the 2018 American Society of Hematology...