“What am I doing here? This question kept running through my mind as the incoming freshman medical students at the University of Chicago assembled for the first time.” The person asking the introspective question was Marvin Stone, fresh out of college, recently married to his wife, Jill, and now a...
Medical memoir dramas, especially those centered in the emergency room (ER), are often met with the anticipation of top-rated medical shows portrayed on TV, in which there is nonstop blood-and-guts action and sizzling tensions between shouting doctors and nurses. In her recently published memoir,...
Although remarkable progress has been made in advancing pediatric cancer research, critical unmet needs remain, especially for more aggressive cancers such as neuroblastomas and Ewing sarcoma. The Stand Up To Cancer–Cancer Research UK Pediatric Cancer New Discoveries Challenge has awarded three...
For this installment of the Living a Full Life series, guest editor Jame Abraham, MD, FACP, spoke with Nedal Estfan, MD, a noted Syrian oncologist who was at the forefront of his county’s earliest efforts to establish a national cancer care system during a time of political and military turmoil....
Karen E. Knudsen, MBA, PhD, is the new President of the Association of American Cancer Institutes (AACI). She began her 2-year term at the close of the virtual 2020 AACI/Cancer Center Administrators Forum (CCAF) Annual Meeting. A member of AACI’s Board of Directors since 2016, Dr. Knudsen chaired ...
Two small phase I studies at separate centers demonstrated encouraging results in the treatment of children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) using reinfused autologous genetically engineered T cells. Results of both studies were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for ...
The text and photograph here are excerpted from a four-volume series of books titled Oncology: Tumors & Treatment, A Photographic History, The Anesthesia Era 1845–1875 by Stanley B. Burns, MD, FACS, and Elizabeth A. Burns. Photograph courtesy of Stanley B. Burns, MD, and The Burns Archive. For ...
“The summons came in the middle of the night. He was awake at the first harsh jangle of the telephone…. Always a light sleeper, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Francis Alexander attributed the trait to his father, an old-fashioned family practitioner whose response to every late-night distress call was...
Over the past decade, a prolific number of cancer memoirs have been published, and some have been award-winning bestsellers. When entering a crowded genre, it is best to have something that sets your story apart. Judith Dwyer Fugate did just that with a memoir about a rare tumor that has rarely if...
The expansion of telemedicine has been one of the most important developments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we discuss some of the legal and ethical dimensions of expanding telemedicine services in oncology practices. As Royce et al discussed in a recent JAMA Oncology article, Congress...
An inspiring case series of fit patients aged 98 and older who recovered from hospitalization for COVID-19, published by Huang et al, reminds us that older age may not be a barrier to recovery.1 On behalf of the Cancer and Aging Research Group, we do not support “ageism” in the care of older...
In 2020, health-care providers from all disciplines are facing challenges never before encountered in the modern era of medicine. Advanced practitioners (APs) are playing critical roles in developing protocols, managing health-care teams, and delivering hands-on patient care. JADPRO Live, the...
Delays in the treatment of breast cancer matter, but not as much “as we and our patients typically assume,” Richard J. Bleicher, MD, FACS, informed participants at the 22nd Annual Lynn Sage Breast Cancer Symposium.1 Some of these delays are unavoidable and others are tradeoffs that must be made to...
A recent review of scientific literature showed that the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted virtually every aspect of cancer care and research—from introducing new risks for patients to disrupting the delivery of treatment and the continuity of research. The report, published by Ziad Bakouny, MD, and...
Recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Breakthrough Therapy designation to an antibody-drug conjugate for the treatment of patients with relapsed or refractory blastic plasmacytoid dendritic cell neoplasm (BPDCN); gave Fast Track designation to a novel chimeric antigen...
ASCO called for new actions to reduce disparities in cancer outcomes affecting racial and ethnic minorities, rural populations, sexual and gender minorities, people without insurance, and other disadvantaged populations. In a policy statement published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO),...
The well-loved Art of Oncology section of the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO) and its pioneering podcast are both resonating as never before, as cancer specialists are prompted into deeper reflections about the poignant moments that give life meaning by the COVID-19 pandemic. JCO’s Art of...
Recent advances such as immune, cellular, and targeted therapies have provided new and effective means to treat a variety of cancers. Despite this considerable progress, cancer caught in its earliest stages remains the most curable. That is why Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is opening a new clinical ...
My father died of thymic cancer when I was 14, and that’s when I decided to become an oncologist. Ironically, the first patient I diagnosed with cancer was me. In 2009, during my first week of training in hematology/oncology at the Mayo Clinic, I began having severe abdominal pain, which had...
City of Hope scientists have combined two immunotherapies—an oncolytic virus and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy—to target solid tumors that are otherwise difficult to treat with CAR T-cell therapy alone, according to a recent study in Science Translational Medicine.1 In preclinical...
As a high school student growing up in St Petersburg, Russia, I was so obsessed with chemistry that I begged my professor for extra problems to complete after school. When I rode the bus home on cold winter evenings, I traced chemical reactions with my finger in the frost on the window. By the...
“One of the most challenging oncologic situations is the diagnosis of breast cancer in a young pregnant patient,” Jacqueline Jeruss, MD, PhD, Associate Dean, Regulatory Affairs; Director of the Breast Care Center; and Professor of Surgery, Pathology, and Biomedical Engineering at the University of...
Robert Knoerl, PhD, RN, Instructor in Medicine and Nurse-Scientist at the Phyllis F. Cantor Center for Research in Nursing and Patient Care Services at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, has been awarded the 2020 Oncology Nursing Society’s Victoria Mock New Investigator Award. This prestigious award is ...
Five years ago, as Rachel B. Issaka, MD, MAS, was beginning her second year as a gastroenterology fellow and feeling proud of the progress she was making in her training, she was suddenly confronted with an all-too-familiar slight that underrepresented minority providers may often experience. As...
She was elderly, slightly confused, and very, very worried. I was not quite sure why. It was a minor procedure—a routine angiogram, one of a dozen to be performed that morning. The risks were so small that the job of admitting her had been handed to me, then a final-year medical student, with a...
As a young girl growing up in central New Jersey, Joyce F. Liu, MD, MPH, a medical oncologist specializing in gynecologic cancers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, dreamed of becoming an astronaut. However, she realized her fear of heights and propensity for motion sickness didn’t jive with...
The challenge in treating patients with borderline resectable pancreatic cancer is how to render tumors resectable and how to achieve the negative surgical margins that enhance long-term survival odds. Fortunately, neoadjuvant chemotherapy is helping to achieve these important goals, according to...
I have been a registered nurse for almost 5 decades and was completely unprepared to hear the words “You have stage IV lung cancer.” I think receiving the diagnosis was especially shocking because the symptoms I began experiencing in the summer of 2015, including some unusual weight gain,...
“Ask any doctor why he or she enters medicine and the answer will likely be the same,” said Marc L. Citron, MD. “People become doctors to help patients...but to deliver the moments that matter to patients—to extend their lives and give quality to their days—doctors rely on new research.” In 2003,...
Global oncology refers to the application of the concepts of global health to cancer and implies an approach to the practice of oncology that acknowledges the reality of limited resources in parts of the world. The Global Oncology Young Investigator Award (YIA) from ASCO and Conquer Cancer, the...
The ASCO Post is pleased to reproduce installments of “Art of Oncology” as published previously in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. These articles focus on the experience of suffering from cancer or of caring for people diagnosed with cancer. They include narratives, topical essays, historical...
In this period of time, more than ever before, I feel the dichotomy of being a non-Hispanic White American vs a person of color. Through the COVID-19 pandemic, I rode the subway to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Ralph Lauren Cancer Center clinic in Harlem, where I was often the only White person on...
Earlier this year, as the COVID-19 pandemic was spreading across the United States, federal health officials and cancer societies urged Americans to delay routine cancer screenings and other elective procedures to keep them out of clinics to avoid potential exposure to the coronavirus and to...
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies are a major advance in the treatment of hematologic malignancies and are making inroads in solid tumors, but there is room for improvement in their design, since not all patients respond, and those who do may relapse. Researchers are studying...
The message still needs to get out that metastatic castration-sensitive prostate cancer should be treated with both androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT) and either docetaxel or an androgen receptor pathway inhibitor. In spite of “overwhelming” support for ADT plus abiraterone/prednisone,...
Public momentum for efforts to address structural and systemic racism has led many health-care institutions to consider how they can work to bring about positive change. In this column, drawing on important recent work by Kimani Paul-Emile, JD, PhD, Professor of Law at Fordham University School of ...
Daniela Matei, MD, Diana, Princess of Wales Professor of Cancer Research at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, grew up Sibiu, a picturesque Romanian city situated at the foothills of the Cindrel Mountains in historic Transylvania. “Both of my parents were physicians, and some of my ...
Sanjiv Sam Gambhir, MD, PhD, Professor and Chair of Radiology at the Stanford School of Medicine and an internationally recognized pioneer in molecular imaging, died on July 18, 2020, of cancer. He was 57. The Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research, Dr. Gambhir dedicated his career...
For nearly 30 years, from the time he was a young resident at the Collis P. Huntington Memorial Hospital for Cancer Research of Harvard University, until his death from lung cancer on August 31, 1969, David A. Karnofsky, MD, dedicated himself to the pursuit of scientific excellence and the...
The dramatic advances in the diagnosis and treatment of multiple myeloma over the past 20 years have resulted in significant improvements in overall survival, with 5-year relative survival rates now around 50% and more than 60% for patients younger than age 70.1 The proteasome inhibitors...
Cleveland Clinic has appointed Jae Jung, PhD, as Chair of Lerner Research Institute’s Department of Cancer Biology. Dr. Jung will also serve as Director of the new Center for Global and Emerging Pathogens Research, which will focus on public health threats ranging from the Zika virus to...
Neuroendocrine tumors are rare malignancies that arise in neuroendocrine cells, which can occur throughout the body but are most commonly found in the gastrointestinal tract, lungs, and pancreas. Although most neuroendocrine tumors are indolent and take years to grow, some are aggressive and grow...
ASCO is conducting an open search for the position of Chief Medical Officer and Executive Vice President, as current Chief Medical Officer Richard L. Schilsky, MD, FACP, FSCT, FASCO, prepares to retire in February 2021. ASCO’s Chief Medical Officer applies medical and scientific knowledge and...
I’m very pleased to be joined by Piyush Srivastava, MD, Past Chair of ASCO’s Clinical Practice Committee. Dr. Srivastava is a practicing gastrointestinal oncologist, Regional Medical Director of the End of Life Options Program, and Director of Outpatient Palliative Care at Kaiser Permanente Walnut...
Great strides in research and clinical practice have decreased breast cancer mortality rates by more than 35% since 1990, yet about 40,000 American women die of the disease each year. In Radical: The Science, Culture, and History of Breast Cancer in America, health-care journalist Kate Pickert...
The ASCO Post is pleased to reproduce installments of the Art of Oncology, as published previously in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. These articles focus on the experience of suffering from cancer or of caring for people diagnosed with cancer, and they include narratives, topical essays,...
It was February 1996, and the first annual meeting of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®) was drawing to a close, when Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Bruce R. Ross, MD, invited comments from the floor. An oncologist who had attended at the urging of a friend—somewhat reluctantly—stood ...
Mustafa Raoof, MD, MS, a surgical oncologist and researcher specializing in gastrointestinal cancers at City of Hope, was recently awarded a Pancreatic Cancer Action Network Career Development Award (PanCAN) and a Young Investigator Award from the National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN). “I’m ...
As outbreaks of the COVID-19 pandemic spiked across the country earlier this year, federal health officials and cancer societies advised people to delay seeking routine cancer screenings, including mammograms and colonoscopies, to keep them out of medical centers and away from potential exposure to ...
Radiation oncologist Gita Suneja, MD, was born and reared in St. Louis, the first-generation daughter of two Indian immigrants. “My father came to the United States to pursue a degree in engineering and decided to remain here, feeling it offered greater opportunities for the family,” Dr. Suneja...