De-escalation of chemoradiotherapy after induction chemotherapy yields excellent oncologic outcomes in patients with high-risk oropharyngeal cancer associated with the human papillomavirus (HPV). Results of the nonrandomized phase II Quarterback trial suggest that this subset of patients may be...
Hematologic malignancies make about 10% of all cancer types in the United States, and the multidisciplinary care of these malignancies has evolved rapidly over the past 20 years. In fact, death rates across all blood cancers have been reduced, and once rapidly fatal diseases such as chronic myeloid ...
Researchers may have discovered how to prevent the cellular-cleaning protein ABCG2 from removing chemotherapeutics from tumor cells, according to a recent study published by Gose et al in Nature Communications. These research findings may improve future cancer therapeutics. Background Most new...
Grim, grimmer, and grinding are among the terms reported in the press to describe the current chemotherapy shortage.1,2 And, “it is not going away,” Mark J. Ratain, MD, FASCO, Chief Hospital Pharmacologist, University of Chicago Medicine, told The ASCO Post. “This is a progressive problem like...
I knew the moment my fingers found a lump in my left breast, in 2018, that it was cancer, and I wondered if I was going to die. My maternal grandmother had been diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 39, the same age I was when I discovered the mass in my breast. She died 5 years later. Divorced ...
Susan M. Love, MD, MBA, a renowned surgeon, author, researcher, and patient advocate who dedicated her life’s work to breast cancer care, died on July 2, 2023, at her home in Los Angeles. The cause of death was recurrent leukemia. She was 75. Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, on February 9, 1948,...
Preparing and running a medical conference is usually a complex but rewarding mission. It is a demanding job that is typically done voluntarily by physicians and educators who are dedicated to professional and community service; advancement of research and education; as well as the dissemination of ...
My patient threatened to kill me. I was in the middle of a busy medical oncology clinic. I was seeing her to discuss test results 1 week after I told her I was concerned that her cancer had returned. As I suspected, the test confirmed recurrent cancer, and this time, it was incurable. I walked into ...
De-escalation of chemoradiotherapy after induction chemotherapy yields excellent oncologic outcomes in patients with high-risk oropharyngeal cancer associated with the human papillomavirus (HPV). Results of the nonrandomized phase II Quarterback trial suggest that this subset of patients may be...
Medicare beneficiaries could save between $228.1 million and $2.15 billion per year if insurers operating the U.S. government's Medicare Part D plans purchased seven generic oncology drugs at the same prices obtained by the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company (MCCPDC), according to a new study...
Elizabeth M. Jaffee, MD, Deputy Director of The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, Baltimore, was born in Brooklyn, New York, in a place and time she found exhilarating during her early years. “We didn’t have a lot of money—actually, we were poor. But I had a lot of freedom walking around...
In the era of genomics and precision medicine, the role of pathology in diagnosis and cancer management is rapidly evolving. For the past 50 years, from her office at the Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute (NCI), pathologist Elaine S. Jaffe, MD, has been at the forefront of that...
Jonathan W. Friedberg, MD, MMSc, Director of the James P. Wilmot Cancer Institute, grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee. While his school friends were attending camp, he spent his summers working on the family farm. “Perhaps the hardest work I’ve ever done was haying on a hot, humid night in July,...
Caroline Robert, MD, PhD, Head of the Dermatology Unit at Gustave Roussy and Co-Director of the Melanoma Research Unit at INSERM 981 Paris-Sud University, was born and reared in Paris. “I didn’t have a vocation for medicine when I was a kid; I wanted to be an archeologist. I’m not from a medical...
Manali Patel, MD, MPH, Associate Professor of Medicine (Oncology) at Stanford University, grew up in Shelby, a small town in the textile and farming community of Western North Carolina, among mill workers and other blue-collar laborers. The daughter of Indian immigrants, Dr. Patel’s early life was...
Susan K. Parsons, MD, MRP, Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine and Founding Director of the Reid R. Sacco Adolescent and Young Adult Program for Cancer and Hereditary Blood Disorders at Tufts Medical Center, grew up on a working dairy farm in Sharon Springs,...
The irony is not missed on me. In August 2022, 2 months before I was to start my tenure as President of the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC), I was diagnosed with mantle cell lymphoma. My entire career over the past 30 years has been in the pursuit of improving global cancer control...
Knowing the health-care system is complex and often creates anxiety for patients newly diagnosed with cancer, the Northwell Health Cancer Institute has launched Cancer Care Direct, a comprehensive program to connect patients with clinical registered nurse navigators who can provide expert guidance...
As discussed in Part I of this special feature on cancer survivorship, there are now more than 18 million cancer survivors in the United States, and that number is expected to grow to 26 million by 2040.1 However, most of those survivors—at least two-thirds—either cured or in remission or living...
In this installment of The ASCO Post’s Global Oncology series, Guest Editor Chandrakanth Are, MBBS, MBA, FRCS, FACS, spoke with Dov Zippel, MD, a surgical oncologist at Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer, Israel, where he is Head of the Meirav Breast Center. Dr. Zippel is the current President of ...
Except for a ganglion cyst that had mysteriously popped up on the palm of my right hand in the winter of 2016, I appeared to be in excellent health. I had never had any serious illnesses in my then 55 years and rarely even got colds. If the annoying cyst hadn’t interfered with my normal daily...
Emergency department (ED) visits by patients with cancer increased by 67.1% between the start of 2012 and the end of 2019, compared with an increase of just 7.5% in cancer incidence, according to a recent study in JAMA Network Open.1 Factors identified as possible explanations for the...
Screening that reduces cancer mortality serves as a foundational element of impactful care for certain cancers. That said, harms related to screening deserve our attention—overdiagnoses; diagnostic odysseys that may be invasive, expensive, or even unintentionally harmful; overtreatment of diagnosed ...
In this installment of our Global Oncology series, Guest Editor Chandrakanth Are, MBBS, MBA, FRCS, FACS, spoke with Kelly M. McMasters, MD, PhD, who, for the past 27 years, has directed a basic and translational science lab studying adenovirus-mediated cancer gene therapy and melanoma biomarkers....
The approval process health insurers impose on medical services or drugs is generating a toll that exceeds the purported benefits, according to a physician survey recently released by the American Medical Association (AMA) and shared in a letter to federal health officials.1 Although health...
A common method of detecting prostate cancer may not be accurate enough to serve as a reliable screening tool by itself, researchers have warned. The digital rectal exam (DRE), in which health-care providers check the prostate gland with a finger for unusual swelling or lumps in the rectum, is...
In this installment of The ASCO Post’s Global Oncology series, Guest Editor Chandrakanth Are, MBBS, MBA, FRCS, FACS, spoke with Kristin Flowers, MD, a general surgeon at Tanana Valley Clinic at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital in rural Alaska. Dr. Flowers’ surgical areas of interest include treating...
Lymphoma expert Jeremy S. Abramson, MD, was born in Westchester County, New York, but soon after, his family relocated to Bergen County, New Jersey, where he spent his formative years. “I attended Tenafly High School and had dual passions: one was the natural sciences and the other on the...
For this installment of The ASCO Post’s Living a Full Life series, Guest Editor Jame Abraham, MD, FACP, spoke with Laurie Glimcher, MD, President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI). She is also Director of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, Principal...
“Risk-reducing bilateral mastectomy allows a woman with a high-penetrance breast cancer-causing mutation to avoid an encounter with the experience of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment,” Seema A. Khan, MD, MPH, stated at the 2022 Lynn Sage Breast Cancer Symposium.1 For these women, by avoiding...
Lymphoma expert Alex Herrera, MD, was born in Miami; his parents were just 19 years old when he was born. Dr. Herrera’s father was born in Puerto Rico to Cuban and Ecuadorian parents. His mother was born in Cuba and came to the United States via Operation Peter Pan, the clandestine program that...
The repercussions from the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 24, 2022, to overturn Roe v Wade, effectively ending a nearly 50-year federal constitutional right to an abortion and allowing instead states to determine abortion access, are starting to be felt in the cancer care community. The ...
The statistics are grim: Worldwide, pancreatic cancer is the 12th most common cancer and the seventh leading cause of cancer mortality.1 In the United States, the malignancy has the highest mortality rate of all major cancers. It is currently the third leading cause of cancer-related death after...
There I was, crying once again all the way from the hospital’s parking lot to my apartment, into the shower, and while trying to fall asleep. This had become the norm during my internal medicine residency. For years, I tried hard every day to be someone else to fit in. It started with off-hand...
The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine “works astonishingly well. It really prevents the kind of infections that cause cancer,” commented Ruanne Barnabas, MBChB, MSc, DPhil, MD, PhD, in an interview with The ASCO Post. “Other viral infections are difficult to protect against, or there might be...
When Stephanie L. Walker, RN, was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 2015, she was not given information about an appropriate clinical trial or help navigating her way through the financial difficulties she was having after a stroke from complications of the cancer forced her to leave her...
In our continuing effort to connect and learn more about our international oncology colleagues, The ASCO Post recently spoke with Rossana Berardi, MD, Professor in Medical Oncology and Director of the Postgraduate School of Oncology at the Università Politecnica Marche, Ancona, Italy, where she is...
In this installment of the Living a Full Life series, Guest Editor Jame Abraham, MD, FACP, spoke with William L. Dahut, MD, who is currently serving as Chief Scientific Officer for the American Cancer Society (ACS). In this role, Dr. Dahut manages all pieces of the organization’s discovery work,...
In this installment of the Living a Full Life series, Guest Editor Jame Abraham, MD, FACP, spoke with Stanton (“Stan”) L. Gerson, MD, Dean and Senior Vice President for Medical Affairs, School of Medicine, and Acting Director of the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center and National Center for...
Nearly one in four families of pediatric patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) enrolled in a clinical trial experienced food insecurity, and almost half of the families eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) did not receive benefits. In addition, receiving SNAP ...
I was just 31 and about to give birth to my fourth child, Yitzchok, when I received a diagnosis of primary mediastinal large B-cell lymphoma. The news was terrifying and crippling. For months, I had been experiencing shortness of breath, coughing, and a pain in my left shoulder, all of which were...
The numbers are dizzying. The costs of cancer care in the United States are rising so fast that by 2030, it is projected the national cancer-attributable costs will total more than $246 billion, up from $183 billion in 2015—a 34% increase.1 And although the total global economic burden of cancer is ...
March 2, 2009. Just published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.1 And we even got the cover. Twists and turns of heat shock protein-90 (Hsp90), the chaperone, the evolutionary capacitor. Great name and important cancer target. People smiled when I talked about this at the Hsp90 conference....
In 2019, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II appointed V. Craig Jordan, CMG, OBE, PhD, DSc, FMedSci, Companion of the Most Distinguished order of St. Michael and St. George (CMG), honoring his extraordinary scientific work in the development of selective estrogen receptor modulators, most notably...
In our continuing effort to connect and learn more about our international oncology colleagues, The ASCO Post recently spoke with Rossana Berardi, MD, Professor in Medical Oncology and Director of the Postgraduate School of Oncology at the Università Politecnica Marche, Ancona, Italy, where she is...
An article in The New York Times earlier this year crystallized the dilemma facing health-care providers when they are presented with a patient in a life-threatening situation: Should they rely on advance care directives written years prior to the current medical situation to accurately determine...
In 2016, Theresa Brown, RN, wrote The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients’ Lives, a vivid real-time description of an oncology nurse’s standard 12-hour shift on a hospital cancer ward. It was an excellent book, which was reviewed on these pages and highly recommended for readers of The...
Women make up just 37.7% of all speakers at hematology and medical oncology board review lectures, according to a study published in Blood Advances. The findings call attention to the many barriers people underrepresented in medicine face in obtaining educational opportunities that can be vital to...
In this installment of The ASCO Post’s Global Oncology series, Guest Editor Chandrakanth Are, MBBS, MBA, FRCS, FACS, spoke with Kevin Billingsley, MD, MBA, FACS, Chief Medical Officer of the Smilow Cancer Hospital and Yale Cancer Center. Although interracial marriage is common in the United States...
In the phase III EVEREST trial, adjuvant everolimus improved median recurrence-free survival in patients with resected renal cell carcinoma (RCC), but this finding failed to be statistically significant in the total study population of 1,499 patients, according to a prespecified boundary. However,...