Invited discussant Guru Subramanian Guru Murthy, MD, MS, of the Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, commented on the study of aspacytarabine in the first-line therapy for patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) unfit for standard chemotherapy. “This study elegantly highlights there is still ...
Aspacytarabine, a cytarabine prodrug, was reported to be safe and effective as first-line therapy for patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) who were unfit for intensive induction chemotherapy, according to the results of a phase II study presented during the 2021 ASCO Annual Meeting.1 The...
A study published by Nowakowska et al in the journal Cancer has found a significant association between the use of cholesterol-lowering statins and survival rates of patients with triple-negative breast cancer. Since statins are relatively inexpensive, easy to access, and produce minimal side...
Research published by Niazi et al in JNCCN—Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network indicates a need to increase mental health and chemical dependency support capabilities at cancer centers across the United States. Previous studies have determined that people diagnosed with cancer...
Among women undergoing surgery for breast cancer, up to 13% will have a postoperative visit to an emergency department, according to recent research. A new study published by Falcone et al in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment discovered there is a greater likelihood that Hispanic and...
A combination of the kinase inhibitor cabozantinib and the immunotherapy nivolumab may make curative surgery possible for some patients with liver cancer who would generally not be considered candidates for surgery, according to research published by Ho et al in Nature Cancer. Rates of Resection...
Invited discussant Giuseppe Curigliano, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Medical Oncology at the University of Milan, Italy, and Head of the Division of Early Drug Development at the European Institute of Oncology, said the “clear” findings of KEYNOTE-5221 are “practice-changing.” However, the...
Recently, The ASCO Post published an article titled "Defining Cure in Multiple Myeloma: A Conversation With S. Vincent Rajkumar, MD." On this episode of the podcast, Dr. Rajkumar, of the Mayo Clinic, talks about what it means to “cure” patients, in light of the fact that multiple myeloma has been...
The session’s invited discussant Surbhi Sidana, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Stanford University, said CAR T-cell therapy and bispecific antibodies targeting myeloma are emerging as potentially effective options for patients with highly refractory disease. For this population of triple...
For the challenging population of patients with multiple myeloma who have become refractory to essentially all current treatments, new approaches are much needed. Early clinical trials data suggest bispecific antibodies may help meet this need, as suggested by studies presented at the 2021 ASCO...
Cancer clinical trial research rapidly adapted to the circumstances of enrolling and treating patients in clinical trials during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to findings from a study of enrollment during 2020 and early 2021 published by Joseph M. Unger, PhD, and colleagues in JAMA Network ...
A meta-analysis of nearly 200,000 men revealed 22 new genetic locations that could be susceptible to inherited testicular germ cell tumors—a 40% increase in the number of regions known to be associated with the cancer. The new findings, published by Pluta et al in Nature Communications, could help...
NEOTALA’s invited discussant, Lisa Carey, MD, the Richardson and Marilyn Jacobs Preyer Distinguished Professor in Breast Cancer Research and Deputy Director of Clinical Sciences at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, saw the findings as part of a bigger trend toward reducing the use of...
For the neoadjuvant treatment of triple-negative breast cancer, the oral poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitor talazoparib yielded promising pathologic complete response rates in the phase II single-arm NEOTALA trial presented at the 2021 ASCO Annual Meeting.1 Preoperative chemotherapy is...
A new clinical guideline from the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) published by Kilian E. Salerno, MD, and colleagues in Practical Radiation Oncology provides guidance on the use of radiation therapy to treat adult patients with soft-tissue sarcomas. Recommendations outline optimal...
The percentage of patients with inflammatory breast cancer who select reconstructive surgery after mastectomy—whether immediate or delayed—remains low in spite of improvements in treatment and long-term survival, but the numbers are increasing, according to recent research published by Karadsheh et ...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is alerting patients and health-care professionals that a clinical trial (OCEAN, Study OP-103; ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT03151811) evaluating melphalan flufenamide with dexamethasone to treat patients with multiple myeloma showed an increased risk ...
Worldwide, the global average surface temperature has risen at a similar rate of 0.17°F per decade since 1901, with the warmest year on record occurring in 2016 and the second warmest occurring in 2020. However, according to NOAA, since the late 1970s, the United States has warmed faster than the...
Chemotherapy has helped make acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) one of the most survivable childhood cancers. Now, a research team has shown how thiopurines may lead to mutations that set patients up for disease relapse. These findings were published by Yang et al in Nature Cancer. The research...
In a clinical trial conducted in Malawi, researchers found that combination chemotherapy with CHOP (cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, vincristine, and prednisone) provided curative benefit compared to current standard-of-care therapy in people diagnosed with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL)—and...
Survival rates for adolescents and young adults diagnosed with cancer vary considerably depending on the type of malignancy. A new study published by Riedel Lewis et al in the journal Cancer indicated that survival for multiple cancer types in such patients has improved in recent years, but some...
The results of the second interim analysis of the KEYNOTE-629 study of pembrolizumab in cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma confirmed durable antitumor activity in both the locally advanced and the recurrent/metastatic settings. Adverse events with pembrolizumab were generally consistent with its...
Over 90% of patients with head and neck cancer receiving curative-intent chemoradiation therapy found weekly palliative care visits to be a valuable addition to their treatment, a recent study published by Bauman et al in the Journal of Palliative Medicine found. Although palliative care is known...
On July 26, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved pembrolizumab (Keytruda) for high-risk, early-stage triple-negative breast cancer in combination with chemotherapy as a neoadjuvant treatment, and then continued as a single agent as adjuvant treatment after surgery. The FDA also...
ASCO will recognize John V. Cox, DO, MBA, FACP, FASCO, a medical oncologist and professor at the University of Texas Southwestern, with the Joseph V. Simone Award and Lecture for Excellence in Quality and Safety in the Care of Patients With Cancer. Dr. Cox will be presented with the award at the...
Individuals with cancer or a history of cancer should be eligible for clinical trials—including COVID-19 vaccine trials—unless there is safety justification for exclusion, ASCO and Friends of Cancer Research (Friends) asserted in a recently released joint position statement. To date, clinical...
ASCO is calling on Congress to continue its bipartisan support of federally funded research. Robust, sustained, and predictable funding growth for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) baseline budgets are critical in advancing our nation’s work toward...
Ovarian cancer carries a heavy morbidity and mortality burden, particularly in settings and regions of the globe that feature significant limitations in health-care resources. Given that ovarian cancer is more lethal than breast cancer, clinicians in resource-limited areas require guidance on the...
Adjuvant anti–PD-1 antibody therapy is widely used for stage III melanoma, given the approvals of pembrolizumab and nivolumab. These approvals were based on significantly improved relapse-free survival in the CheckMate 238 trial of nivolumab compared with ipilimumab and the EORTC 1325/KEYNOTE-054...
According to George W. Sledge, Jr, MD, FASCO, Professor of Medicine in the Division of Oncology at Stanford University Medical Center, by the beginning of the next decade, clinicians will be aided by the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in many facets of care and by the approval of a wave of new ...
Clinical social worker, grief expert, and university dean Erica Sirrine, PhD, has been named Director of Social Work at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. For the past 14 years, Dr. Sirrine has worked in higher education, most recently serving as Dean of the College of Behavioral and Social...
Shilpa Gupta, MD, has been appointed Director of Genitourinary Medical Oncology at Taussig Cancer Institute and Co-Leader of the Genitourinary Oncology Program at Cleveland Clinic. Her research interests include novel drug development and understanding biomarkers in bladder cancer treatment. Nima ...
Fox Chase Cancer Center recently announced that Peter Abdelmessieh, DO, MSc, will be joining the staff of the Department of Bone Marrow Transplant and Cellular Therapies. Prior to joining Fox Chase, Dr. Abdelmessieh was at Christiana Care Health System in Delaware, where he performed a majority of ...
The Division of Oncology at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) has appointed Sarah Tasian, MD, as Chief of the Section of Hematologic Malignancies. Dr. Tasian succeeds Richard Aplenc, MD, PhD, MSCE, who served in this role for 13 years. Dr. Tasian will oversee a group of faculty,...
Fabrice André, MD, PhD, Director of Research and Professor of Medical Oncology at Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France, commented on the two studies that used the MammaPrint 70-gene signature to identify patients for de-escalation or escalation of endocrine therapy.1,2 The push to...
Patients with ultra-low–risk breast cancer, as classified by the MammaPrint 70-gene assay, had “excellent” long-term outcomes regardless of clinical risk or receipt of adjuvant therapy, a new analysis of the MINDACT trial has shown.1 In a separate study, a retrospective analysis of the National...
The following letter is adapted from comments made to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) by the American College of Radiology, the GO2 Foundation for Lung Cancer, and the Society of Thoracic Surgeons. “The American College of Radiology, the GO2 Foundation for Lung Cancer, and the...
From the moment I felt a searing pain go through my right breast, I had a premonition that something was very wrong. Although I couldn’t feel anything unusual when I did a breast self-exam, I made an appointment with my gynecologist for a more thorough clinical breast exam and a mammogram. Because...
Woe to the child who tastes salty from a kiss on the brow” was a forbidding prophecy from Medieval Europe, presaging unknown disease. Today, we know that salty skin is a telltale sign of cystic fibrosis in children, a disease that eluded medical identification until 1938, when an American...
Prostate cancer experts have often stated it is important to add a bone-protecting agent for patients on treatment for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. Recent evidence in support of this recommendation comes from a study presented during the 2021 ASCO Annual Meeting, confirming a...
Targeting mutations appears to be bearing fruit in the treatment of some difficult-to-treat tumors. For instance, in one study of adult-onset neuroblastoma, targeting ALK mutations in ALK-positive tumors demonstrated activity, even in patients who had not responded to their first ALK inhibitor. Of...
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) recently announced a $20 million gift from the Ge Li & Ning Zhao Family Foundation to support lung cancer research and the development of new therapies to treat this disease. Lung cancer is responsible for 25% of all cancer deaths and is the leading...
The ASCO Post’s Integrative Oncology series is intended to facilitate the availability of evidence-based information on integrative and complementary therapies sometimes used by patients with cancer. In this installment, Eugenie Spiguel, MSN, ANP-BC, and Jyothirmai Gubili, MS, focus on American...
Canada’s publicly funded health-care system has a complex drug approval and funding process. Due to multiple assessment steps and bureaucratic processes, newly developed cancer drugs can often experience long delays before oncologists may use them to treat their patients with cancer. Several...
Invited discussant of the FORWARD II trial,1Amit M. Oza, MD, MBBS, concluded that bevacizumab and mirvetuximab soravtansine was a “very well tolerated and effective” combination with “encouraging activity,” even in patients previously treated with bevacizumab and weekly paclitaxel. Dr. Oza is Head ...
“Learning never exhausts the mind.” —Leonardo da Vinci To complement The ASCO Post’s continued comprehensive coverage of the 2020 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition, here are several abstracts selected from the meeting proceedings focusing on treatments under study ...
In patients with recurrent ovarian cancer, the antibody-drug conjugate mirvetuximab soravtansine, given with bevacizumab, showed antitumor activity leading to durable responses in platinum-agnostic patients with strong expression of folate receptor alpha (FRα), researchers reported at the 2021 ASCO ...
Ajay Maker, MD, FACS, has been appointed Chief of the new Division of Surgical Oncology in the Department of Surgery and the Maurice Galante Distinguished Professor in Surgical Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He will lead surgical oncology services—including breast,...
In the phase III GLOW trial, the all-oral regimen of fixed-duration ibrutinib plus venetoclax as first-line treatment for older or unfit patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) showed superior efficacy compared with chlorambucil and obinutuzumab.1Kostas Stamatopoulos, MD, PhD, of the...
Thoracic medical oncologist Sukhmani K. Padda, MD, was recently selected to direct Thoracic Medical Oncology at Cedars-Sinai Cancer Center in Los Angeles. Dr. Padda’s appointment, following a national search, reflects her breadth of experience as a clinician and researcher in the field of thoracic...