Two papers published in Nature reveal long-disregarded functions of the thymus in adulthood, showing that the overall health of the organ impacts aging and risks for cardiovascular disease and cancer, as well as affecting response to immunotherapy in patients with cancer. “The thymus has been...
Patients with leptomeningeal metastasis have historically had few treatment options. Now, researchers have found a combination of the tyrosine kinase inhibitor tucatinib and the monoclonal antibody trastuzumab, plus the chemotherapy capecitabine, may improve symptoms and extend survival in some...
Metformin use was linked to lower odds of developing esophageal squamous cell carcinoma in a Nordic population–based case-control study, according to findings published by Xie et al in JAMA Network Open. “This should prompt investigations of metformin as a preventive option in high-risk individuals ...
On March 20, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved nivolumab (Opdivo) with doxorubicin, vinblastine, and dacarbazine (AVD) for adult and pediatric patients aged 12 years and older with previously untreated stage III or IV classical Hodgkin lymphoma. The FDA also granted traditional...
Overall cancer incidence is similar between women who have used medically assisted reproduction and the general population, but certain cancers may occur at slightly higher rates, according to an Australian population–based cohort study published in JAMA Network Open by Vajdic et al. The...
Where a person lives in the United States increasingly shapes their chances of developing and surviving cancer. A new large nationwide study by researchers at the American Cancer Society (ACS) reports a long-term shift in the high cancer burden from urban to rural areas in the United States. The...
Adding hormone therapy to postprostatectomy radiotherapy may provide little survival benefit for most men with prostate cancer, especially those with very low prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels before treatment. In the study, reported at the 2026 ASCO Genitourinary Cancers Symposium,1 men with...
As the incidence of cancer among reproductive-age people continues to increase in the United States—with approximately one out of every 1,000 pregnancies complicated by cancer—the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine (SMFM) has issued its first evidence-based clinical guidance for diagnosing and...
A new analysis suggests that prostate cancer screening may compare favorably with screening for breast cancer in terms of identifying significant cancers, reducing mortality, and avoiding unnecessary harms, according to findings presented at the 2026 Annual Congress of the European Association of...
One in 10 patients who present to the emergency department with visible hematuria may die within 3 months, new research from the United Kingdom has indicated. The WASHOUT study, presented at the European Association of Urology Congress (EAU26) in London, found that a scan administered within 48...
Romiplostim was beneficial in treating chemotherapy-induced thrombocytopenia, according to findings from the global phase III RECITE trial published in The New England Journal of Medicine. “This work has been nearly a decade in the making, and it is so important because there are no available...
Recurrence-free survival was similar between adjuvant therapy with the PD-1 inhibitor pembrolizumab and placebo in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma who achieved a complete radiologic response after surgical resection or local ablation, based on the phase III KEYNOTE-937 trial.1 Presented at...
Based on results from the phase III KEYNOTE-564 study,1 adjuvant pembrolizumab is currently a standard of care for patients with clear cell renal cell carcinoma who have an increased risk of recurrence following a nephrectomy. Now, results from the phase III LITESPARK-022 study investigating the...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has launched a new platform, called the FDA Adverse Event Monitoring System (AEMS), for analyzing adverse events from drugs and products. The platform consolidates multiple prior reporting systems in an effort to modernize and increase transparency into...
Severe COVID-19 and influenza infections may prime the lungs for cancer and can accelerate the disease’s development—but vaccination heads off those harmful effects, according to new research published by Qian et al in Cell. University of Virginia (UVA) School of Medicine researcher Jie Sun, PhD,...
A structured exercise program in patients with cancer receiving chemotherapy led to a reduction in self-reported cognitive impairment vs those receiving chemotherapy who were not on an exercise plan, according to findings from a nationwide, randomized phase III trial published in JNCCN—Journal of...
A new study has found that patients with prostate cancer and low testosterone levels may have a higher risk of their cancer progressing to a more aggressive form while under active surveillance. The findings, published by Lawen et al in the The Journal of Urology, suggest that baseline testosterone ...
The 2025 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS 2025) featured some exciting presentations. The early breast cancer highlights at SABCS 2025 included the landmark lidERA trial, which explored the efficacy of the oral selective estrogen receptor degrader (SERD) giredestrant in the adjuvant...
In a European phase II/III trial (AXINET) reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Garcia-Carbonero et al found that the addition of axitinib to long-acting octreotide appeared to show activity in patients with advanced extrapancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (epNETs). Study Details The...
In a study of adults with advanced prostate cancer taking androgen-receptor pathway inhibitors (ARPIs) and different types of anticoagulants, investigators found no evidence of an increase in patients’ bleeding or clotting risks, despite previous lab results that raised alarms. These findings were...
This is Part 2 of Optimizing the Care Continuum for EGFR-Mutant NSCLC, a three-part video roundtable series. Scroll down to watch the other videos from this roundtable. In this video, Drs. Suresh Ramalingam, Zofia Piotrowska, and Helena Yu discuss the management of acquired resistance after...
Researchers have identified that the reporting of venous and arterial thrombotic events in cancer clinical trials is inconsistent and potentially inaccurate, according to a comments article published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.1 “Mandatory and uniform reporting of all [venous and arterial...
On March 5, 2026, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved teclistamab (Tecvayli) in combination with daratumumab hyaluronidase-fihj for the treatment of adult patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma who have received at least one prior line of therapy, including a...
Short-term exposure to low-dose vaginal estrogen therapy may relieve some symptoms of menopause for younger survivors of endometrial cancer without increasing the risk of endometrial cancer recurrence, according to findings from a study published in Menopause. “Early detection and improved,...
In a retrospective study reported in The Lancet Oncology, Lalchungnunga et al tested the classification accuracy of a molecular inference–based artificial intelligence (AI) model (Neuropath-AI) in central nervous system (CNS) tumor diagnosis. Study Details The multi-institutional study included...
Prompts on posts with social cues—such as messages indicating how many users have flagged a post—and clear platform review policies may encourage intervention and reduce sharing of cancer treatment misinformation on social media, according to Lazard et al, who reported findings from their online...
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools that detect molecular biomarker status from histologic images may be dependent upon correlational relationships with clinicopathologic features, preventing the models from learning the true causal effect of the biomarker, according to findings published in Nature...
Combining a visual inspection of the bladder—systematic endoscopic evaluation—with a blood test to check for the presence of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) may accurately predict which patients with bladder cancer still have cancer in their bladder after treatment and which do not. These findings,...
In 2015, LH, a 66-year-old female, was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), Rai stage 0. Untreated, the woman’s lymphocyte count rose from 5,000/mm3 to 16,000/mm3 in 6 years (doubling time = 4.2 years). She was then advised to stop eating red meat (see the figure). Commercially...
Advanced-stage follicular lymphoma is currently considered incurable. But a new analysis of long-term data from patients treated for the disease years ago with standard regimens of immunotherapy and a chemotherapy combination known as CHOP suggests that many of those patients can now be considered...
In a new study published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Johnson et al reported that an automated artificial intelligence (AI) pipeline using large language models (LLMs) can accurately stratify future risk of advanced neoplasia in patients with colitis-associated low-grade dysplasia....
Circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) may be used to predict metastatic risk and identify which patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer are more likely to benefit from a bladder-sparing treatment approach, according to findings from the RETAIN trials presented at the 2026 ASCO Genitourinary Cancers...
At the 2026 ASCO Genitourinary Cancers Symposium, Robert J. Motzer, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, presented results from the second interim analysis of the phase III LITESPARK-011 trial showing improved progression-free survival, higher objective response rate, and a trend toward...
The results from the randomized phase III KEYNOTE-B15/EV-304 study show that neoadjuvant and adjuvant enfortumab vedotin plus pembrolizumab significantly improved event-free survival, overall survival, and pathologic complete response rate in patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer who were...
In time for the assigned deadline of February 23, 2026, medical societies, companies, health-care systems, and more have responded to a request for information from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regarding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in clinical practice. The Request...
On February 26, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted accelerated approval to zongertinib (Hernexeos), a kinase inhibitor, for an expanded indication for adults with unresectable or metastatic nonsquamous non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) whose tumors have HER2 tyrosine kinase domain ...
Prostate specific antigen (PSA) screening remains one of the most controversial of “standard” medical practices. As recently as the 2026 Super Bowl, one of the more unusual TV advertisements, sponsored by a pharmaceutical company with an interest in prostate cancer treatments, extolled the virtues ...
Among the high-quality abstract presentations at the annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS), a few always stand out as particularly meritorious. Each year, The ASCO Post asks its Senior Deputy Editor, breast cancer specialist Jame Abraham, MD, FACP, to offer his top picks for most...
Each year in the United States, about 90,000 adolescents and young adults (AYAs), ages 15 to 39, are diagnosed with cancer,1 and they are immediately faced with myriad challenges and disruptions in their life stages, including psychosocial distress; interruptions in their education, career, and...
In a study reported in JAMA Oncology, Rakaee et al identified the accuracy of open-source artificial intelligence (AI) models in predicting the presence of EGFR mutations in samples from patients with lung adenocarcinoma, including according to ancestral subgroups. Study Details The study included...
In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Zhao et al found that patients with non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in Medicaid expansion states have had improvements in earlier diagnosis, early initiation of treatment, and survival. Study Details In the study, patients newly diagnosed...
In February, ASCO and Conexiant launched ASCO AI in Oncology (ascoai.org), a digital platform dedicated to understanding how artificial intelligence (AI) is impacting cancer care. “Our goal with this hub is to empower oncology professionals with knowledge and the tools to adapt to a rapidly...
In a Dutch phase II study (TRAIN-3) reported in The Lancet Oncology, Louis et al found that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-guided optimization of duration of neoadjuvant chemotherapy was associated with favorable event-free survival in patients with stage II to III HER2-positive breast cancer....
ASCO has published an updated guideline on systemic therapy for patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC), representing ASCO’s first Living Guideline in the area of prostate cancer and the first in any genitourinary (GU) cancer.1 “Guidelines will become less useful if...
Microplastics and nanoplastics were identified in samples from 9 out of 10 patients with prostate cancer, with greater levels of these small plastic fragments inside tumors than in nearby normal tissue, according to findings from a small pilot study that will be presented at the upcoming 2026 ASCO...
U.S. counties located closer to operational nuclear power plants (NPPs) have higher rates of cancer mortality than those located farther away, according to a new study published by Alwadi et al in Nature Communications. The study is the first of the 21st century to analyze proximity to NPPs and...
Researchers have reported findings that may help redefine treatment for patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer, a potentially aggressive form of the disease that is traditionally treated with surgical removal of the bladder. The study, published by Matthew D. Galsky, MD, and colleagues in the ...
Researchers have developed a new computational approach designed to better account for changes in gene expression within tumors relative to their unique microenvironments. This approach outperformed current methods for predicting chemotherapy response in patients with triple-negative breast ...
The bispecific antibody odronextamab plus standard CHOP (cyclophosphamide, vincristine, doxorubicin, prednisone) chemotherapy yielded robust and durable responses in treatment-naive patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), based on the first results of the phase III OLYMPIA-3 study...
A genetic study of Mexican patients with acral melanoma revealed that the cancer subtype encompasses three groups that may each have distinct gene expressions associated with different survival outcomes, according to findings published in Nature. “We found that acral melanoma is not a single...