The past year has witnessed tremendous advances in genitourinary oncology. I am pleased to review these findings in this year’s Genitourinary Oncology Almanac from The ASCO Post. I hope that you will find this roadmap helpful in highlighting a selection of these exciting developments. Checkpoint...
The PARP inhibitor olaparib in combination with abiraterone demonstrated a statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvement in radiographic progression-free survival vs current standard-of-care abiraterone as a first-line treatment for patients with metastatic castration-resistant...
Glenn J. Hanna, MD, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, discusses findings that show human papillomavirus circulating tumor DNA (HPV ctDNA) may be useful as part of surveillance monitoring of patients with oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma. Dr. Hanna reports that 93% of...
American Society of Hematology (ASH) session co-moderator Matthew Genyeh Mei, MD, Associate Professor, Hematologic Malignancies and Stem Cell Transplantation Institute of City of Hope in Southern California, said the studies of checkpoint inhibitors in newly diagnosed and previously treated Hodgkin ...
Pembrolizumab monotherapy is an established treatment strategy for relapsed or refractory classical Hodgkin lymphoma. In combination with chemotherapy, the checkpoint inhibitor is also showing value in the front-line setting and further boosting outcomes in the relapsed setting, according to...
In this installment of Living a Full Life, guest editor Jame Abraham, MD, spoke with Gerardo Colón-Otero, MD, Professor of Medicine at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Past Chair of the Division of Hematology/Oncology at the Mayo Clinic in Florida, and Vice Dean at Mayo Clinic Alix School of...
Artificial intelligence (AI) has captured society’s imagination and generated enthusiasm for its potential to improve our quality of life, especially in the health-care arena. The availability of high-dimensionality data sets along with innovations in high-performance computing and deep-learning...
Samuel J. Klempner, MD, Associate Professor at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, commented on the NEONIPIGA study for The ASCO Post. “This study was the first prospective data set to show what many have suspected—that neoadjuvant immune checkpoint blockade would lead to a...
The phase II GERCOR NIPICOL study evaluated 1 year of treatment with nivolumab plus ipilimumab in patients with chemotherapy-resistant metastatic colorectal cancer whose tumors were microsatellite instability–high (MSI-H) or mismatch repair–deficient (dMMR). With this shortened treatment duration,...
Mihir Gupta, MD, a neurosurgery resident at the University of California San Diego and postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Neurosurgery, and Ganesh M. Shankar, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School,...
Circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) is readily detectable in the plasma and cerebrospinal fluid of patients with central nervous system (CNS) lymphoma and is a strong prognostic biomarker for outcomes, a team of researchers from Germany and Stanford University reported at the 2021 American Society of...
Scientists have determined that first responders to the World Trade Center during the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks have increased levels of mutations that may escalate their risk for blood cancers or cardiovascular disease, according to a study published by Jasra et al in Nature Medicine....
Researchers at City of Hope published data pointing to the limitations of a popular liquid biopsy that is used to detect the recurrence of colorectal cancer in patients who who have undergone surgical resection. The findings were published in JAMA Network Open by Marwan Fakih, MD, and colleagues....
In a Dutch study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Janna A. Hol, MD, and colleagues found that (epi)genetic predisposing factors could be identified in one-third of children diagnosed with Wilms tumor. As stated by the investigators, “Wilms tumor is associated with (epi)genetic...
Simon J. Crabb, PhD, MBBS, of the Southampton Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre, discusses data from the ATLANTIS trial, in which the authors hypothesized that switch maintenance therapy with the PARP inhibitor rucaparib, in patients who have derived clinical benefit from first-line chemotherapy, ...
A large, multi-institutional study demonstrated that a blood test to detect circulating tumor DNA may accurately predict recurrence of human papillomavirus (HPV)-driven oropharyngeal cancer following treatment. Results also indicated that the biomarker test may detect recurrent disease earlier than ...
Amy Tiersten, MD, Professor of Medicine, Hematology, and Medical Oncology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Carlos L. Arteaga, MD, Director of the Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center and Associate Dean of Oncology at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas,...
Switching from an aromatase inhibitor to fulvestrant upon early identification of the ESR1 mutation in plasma—before disease progression—doubled progression-free survival in the phase III PADA-1 trial, presented at the 2021 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.1 “PADA-1 is the first trial to...
Charles Shapiro, MD, Professor of Medicine, Hematology and Medical Oncology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, commented on the study findings. “MA.32 is a large, randomized placebo-controlled trial of metformin in over 3,600 women with invasive breast cancer. The rationale for...
The final protocol-defined analysis of the phase III PALLAS trial confirmed the negative results of the second interim analysis, showing no benefit of palbociclib plus endocrine therapy in the adjuvant breast cancer setting. Michael Gnant, MD, of the Medical University of Vienna, reported these...
In its first return to a hybrid model since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the 2021 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) brought together researchers, clinicians, industry experts, patients, and advocates from across the globe to present and grapple with new data and important topics in breast ...
A new mutation was identified in 9% of relapsed cases of pediatric acute myeloid leukemia (AML) that may define a new subtype of the disease, according to a study published by Umeda et al in Blood Cancer Discovery. The mutation is a tandem duplication (a series of adjacent repeats of a DNA...
On February 21, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved FoundationOne CDx to be used as a companion diagnostic to identify patients with microsatellite instability–high (MSI-H) status solid tumors who may be appropriate candidates for treatment with pembrolizumab. FoundationOne CDx is...
In December 2021, Nobel laureates, cancer center directors, physicians, scientists, politicians, public health officials, and patient advocates gathered at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the National...
Rona Yaeger, MD, Associate Attending Physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, discussed the results of the GALAXY trial,1 first putting them into context with previous studies. As she pointed out, the finding of an 11-fold increase in risk of recurrence in patients who...
The use of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) assays in early-stage colorectal cancer is highly prognostic for recurrence and may help identify patients who could benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy, according to findings from the GALAXY trial, presented at the 2022 ASCO Gastrointestinal Cancers...
A woman with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) who received a cord blood stem cell transplant to treat acute myeloid leukemia has had no detectable levels of HIV for 14 months, despite cessation of antiretroviral therapy, according to research presented at the Conference on Retroviruses and...
In the phase II GALAHAD trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Matthew R. Smith, MD, and colleagues found that the poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitor niraparib showed activity in patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer and DNA repair gene defects whose disease had...
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...
Charles Shapiro, MD, Professor of Medicine, Hematology and Medical Oncology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, commented on the study findings. “MA.32 is a large, randomized placebo-controlled trial of metformin in over 3,600 women with invasive breast cancer. The rationale for...
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 ...
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...
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 a Chinese phase II trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Li et al found that treatment with two cycles of concurrent cisplatin and intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) was noninferior to three cycles in progression-free survival and associated with reduced toxicity in patients...
Writing a comprehensive book about breast cancer that is also concise and highly readable is no easy task. However, the authors of The Breast Cancer Book: A Trusted Guide for You and Your Loved Ones have done that and more by deftly communicating science and medical content for the lay public....
Amy Tiersten, MD, Professor of Medicine, Hematology, and Medical Oncology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Carlos L. Arteaga, MD, Director of the Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center and Associate Dean of Oncology at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas,...
Switching from an aromatase inhibitor to fulvestrant upon early identification of the ESR1 mutation in plasma—before disease progression—doubled progression-free survival in the phase III PADA-1 trial, presented at the 2021 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.1 “PADA-1 is the first trial to...
Peptide receptor radionuclide therapy (PRRT) with lutetium-177 (Lu-177) dotatate is a treatment for well-differentiated neuroendocrine tumors that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved in 2018, but clinicians have lacked a metric for predicting its benefit on an individual patient basis....
Although radiation can be an effective therapy for prostate cancer, about one in six men will experience more frequent or painful urination as a lingering side effect. These disruptive genitourinary toxicities can occur whether the patient receives conventionally fractionated radiotherapy or...
Two recent studies correct a long-standing misconception about the origins of Barrett’s esophagus and, in doing so, may point to new avenues of treatment or prevention to lower the risk of esophageal cancer. The first study, published by Singh et al in the journal Gastroenterology, demonstrated...
Although the incidence and mortality rates in colorectal cancer have dropped by 3.6% each year from 2007 to 2016 for people aged 55 and older—mainly because of increased colorectal cancer screening, advances in therapy, and reductions in smoking—these rates have increased by 2% each year during the ...
Molecular and genetic research has advanced the categorization of different risk groups in patients with smoldering myeloma. Notable presentations at the 2021 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition included reports on biomarkers to predict response to immunotherapy in...
In a phase II trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Schneider et al found that genomically directed therapy did not improve 2-year disease-free survival vs treatment of physician’s choice in patients with residual triple-negative breast cancer following neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Study ...
The final protocol-defined analysis of the phase III PALLAS trial confirmed the negative results of the second interim analysis, showing no benefit of palbociclib plus endocrine therapy in the adjuvant breast cancer setting. Michael Gnant, MD, of the Medical University of Vienna, reported these...
Despite the availability of several effective screening tests, colorectal cancer screening rates remain below national goals. Although colonoscopy is the most often recommended screening method, a new study has found that the preferences of primary care clinicians have shifted toward noninvasive...
The Nobel Laureate Otto Warburg was regarded as one of the most significant biochemists of the 20th century, whose exhaustive research led to an understanding of cancer that remains significant to this day. Warburg was also one of the most despised figures in his homeland of Nazi Germany. As a...
Among patients with hormone receptor–positive breast cancer treated with an aromatase inhibitor plus palbociclib, those who displayed a rising ESR1 mutation detected in their blood before disease progression doubled their median progression-free survival following a switch to fulvestrant plus...
In the treatment of patients with human papillomavirus (HPV)-related oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma, neither cancer outcomes nor measurable quality of life have yet been shown to differ between surgery- and radiotherapy-based approaches, according to Sue S. Yom, MD, PhD, FASTRO, Professor of ...
Although enormous progress over the past 50 years in every aspect of cancer care, including prevention, screening, chemotherapy, targeted therapy, surgery, radiation therapy, and supportive care, has resulted in increases in lives saved—from 3 million in 1971 to 16.9 million in 2019—the burden of...
Investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine have identified significant differences in the molecular characteristics of tumors from younger and older patients with cancer across several cancer types. Their research, published by Shah et al in Cell Reports, suggests that cancer treatment could...