There was no epiphany or family influences, as long as she can remember; Anne S. Tsao, MD, always wanted to be a doctor or, because of her love for caring for sick animals, a veterinarian. Dr. Tsao was born in Fountain Creek, Pennsylvania, but her parents moved to a suburb just outside of Chicago...
A health-care system is evaluated by various metrics: one is how it cares for its most vulnerable patients. The United States spends far more on health care than any nation in the world, yet access to high-quality oncology services remains elusive to certain minority populations—none more so than...
Nearly 4 in 10 Americans believe cancer can be cured solely through alternative therapies, according to ASCO's second annual National Cancer Opinion Survey. This is despite research showing that patients who use alternative therapies instead of standard cancer treatments have much higher...
Female survivors of childhood cancer, especially those treated with chest irradiation, have a substantially higher risk of developing breast cancer later in life. As a result, current clinical screening of this high-risk population relies primarily on the radiation dose and volume to the...
The American Society of Hematology (ASH) will recognize John E. Dick, PhD, of the University of Toronto, Princess Margaret Cancer Center, and Ontario Institute for Cancer Research in Toronto, and Reed E. Drews, MD, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, with the 2018 Mentor Award for...
The American Society of Hematology (ASH) will recognize Victor Hoffbrand, DM, FRCP, FMed Sci, of the University College London, with the 2018 Wallace H. Coulter Award for Lifetime Achievement in Hematology, the Society’s highest honor. Dr. Hoffbrand will be recognized for his contributions to...
Persephone is a 4,088-patient trial that Helena Margaret Earl, MBBS, PhD, reported at the 2018 ASCO Annual Meeting as establishing that 6 months of trastuzumab (Herceptin) is not inferior to 12 months in 4-year survival without invasive or local regional recurrence or distant metastases. Dr. Earl...
The Persephone presentation by Helena Margaret Earl, MBBS, PhD, got a lot of publicity after a pre–ASCO Annual Meeting press release, suggesting that 6 months of adjuvant trastuzumab (Herceptin) is enough. The advice of experts has been that the evidence is inconclusive, but I have not heard a...
Radiation therapy to the limited disease in patients with early-stage follicular lymphoma “achieves local control in over 90% of lesions, and almost 50% of patients remain free of any lymphoma event (cured) for decades,” Joanna C. Yang, MD, MPH, and Joachim Yahalom, MD, wrote in a recent editorial...
Three prominent medical societies have issued a new clinical guideline for physicians treating men with early-stage prostate cancer using external-beam radiation therapy (EBRT). Adoption of the guideline could make treatment shorter and more convenient for many patients with prostate cancer....
Neoadjuvant treatment with a combination of the immune checkpoint inhibitors nivolumab (Opdivo) and ipilimumab (Yervoy) achieved major pathological responses in mismatch repair–deficient (dMMR) early-stage colon cancers, according to results reported by Chalabi et al at the European...
Adjuvant treatment with zoledronic acid, plus hormonal therapy with the aromatase inhibitor letrozole, significantly increases disease-free survival compared to tamoxifen in premenopausal women with hormone receptor–positive early breast cancer, according to results reported by Perrone et al...
The first report of a large international clinical trial shows that, for men who show signs of prostate cancer after surgical removal of their prostates, extending radiation therapy to the pelvic lymph nodes combined with adding short-term androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT) to standard treatment...
Although population-based cancer registries data are useful in tracking and reporting the evolving burden of cancer in the population, the information they capture reflects the outcomes of diagnosis and death, regardless of whether the death is due to the disease or to other causes, and not data on ...
The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) recently issued a statement on lung cancer screening with low-dose computed tomography (CT) based on the results of the Dutch-Belgian NELSON lung cancer screening trial presented at the IASLC 19th World Conference on Lung Cancer...
Adding radiation therapy or surgery to systemic therapy for patients with stage IV lung cancer whose cancer has spread to a limited number of sites can significantly extend overall survival, according to new results from a multicenter, randomized, controlled phase II study. The findings were...
A highly sensitive blood test that detects minute traces of cancer-specific DNA has been shown to accurately determine whether patients with human papillomavirus (HPV)-related oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (OPSCC) are free from cancer following radiation therapy. Findings were presented by...
Vinai Gondi, MD, of Northwestern Medicine, discusses the early results of a phase III NRG Oncology trial that suggests a practice change in treating brain metastases: avoiding the hippocampus when delivering whole-brain radiotherapy (Abstract LBA9).
In a 10-year study of women who received radiation therapy to treat early-stage breast cancer, those receiving fewer, larger individual radiation doses experienced similarly low rates of late-onset side effects as those undergoing conventional radiation therapy. Findings from the...
A phase III trial has determined that cisplatin chemotherapy combined with radiation therapy showed high amounts of activity in human papillomavirus (HPV)-related head and neck cancer. Findings from NRG-RTOG 1016 were presented by Trotti et al the 60th Annual Meeting of the American Society for...
The grandson of Italian immigrants, Philip J. DiSaia was born on August 14, 1937, in Providence, Rhode Island. He earned his Bachelor’s in Science at Brown University and his MD at Tufts University. Upon the advice of his mentor in medical school, Dr. DiSaia obtained 2 years of general surgery...
For patients with early kidney cancer, surgically removing a portion of the kidney instead of the whole organ is often a preferred treatment, because the procedure can effectively remove tumors while preserving kidney function. But when it comes to the best surgical approach—robotic, laparoscopic, ...
Radiation therapy for early-stage follicular lymphoma “is underused,” Joanna C. Yang, MD, MPH, and Joachim Yahalom, MD, declared in a recent editorial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.1 This underuse of radiation therapy can result in overtreatment with systemic therapies or overconfidence in...
The Friends of Cancer Research (Friends) recently announced the launch of phase II of its tumor mutational burden Harmonization Project, as the research team finalizes data collected from phase I in silico analysis. “Recent data show a role for [tumor mutational burden] in identifying patients...
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. Although physical activity is associated with many positive outcomes in the general population,...
I’m a psychiatrist, so I don’t say this lightly: receiving a diagnosis of stage IV gastric adenocarcinoma made me insane. I had remembered the horrible deaths due to abdominal cancer I had seen during my medical training and was terrified that would be my fate as well. I knew from looking at the...
To gain further insight into, among other things, optimizing big data and the latest on hormonal breast cancer treatment, The ASCO Post recently spoke with pioneering oncologist Christopher C. Benz, MD, a breast cancer specialist and Director of the Cancer & Developmental Therapeutics Program, ...
Recently, the term “personalized medicine” in oncology care has been overtaken by the more contemporary concept of “precision medicine.” According to the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, the newer terminology shifts the focus to improving...
Nationally regarded breast cancer researcher and clinician Joyce A. O’Shaughnessy, MD, was born in upstate New York, just outside of Albany, where she attended grade school before her family moved to Beverly, Massachusetts, a suburban town 26 miles from Boston, where her family’s roots were....
Suresh S. Ramalingam, MD, of the Emory University School of Medicine, summarizes the top-line lung cancer results reported at this year’s ESMO Congress, including the role of targeted treatment for early stage NSCLC, combining immunotherapy for surgically resectable disease, and immunotherapy for...
Radiotherapy to the prostate improved overall survival in men newly diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer who have a low metastatic disease burden, but not in those with higher burden of disease, according to results from a preplanned analysis of a large comparison study reported by Parker et...
Two-year maintenance therapy with olaparib (Lynparza), a poly ADP-ribose polymerase (PARP) inhibitor, led to a substantial improvement in progression-free survival (PFS) in newly diagnosed patients with advanced ovarian cancer and a BRCA1/2 mutation, results from the phase III SOLO-1 trial...
The ASCO Research Community Forum (RCF) 2018 Annual Meeting brought together 165 physician investigators and research staff from 34 states across the country—its largest meeting to date—to discuss contemporary challenges and develop creative solutions in conducting and managing clinical trials. The ...
When Frederick B. Sontag’s wife, Susan, was diagnosed in 1994 with grade III astrocytoma, the couple was understandably overwhelmed to hear that her expected survival was 3 years. At that time, there were few organizations providing resources to patients with brain tumors and their families. While...
Three new Vice-Chairs of the Scientific Advisory Committee of Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) were announced by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), the Scientific Partner of SU2C. They are Nobel Laureate Elizabeth H. Blackburn, PhD, of the University of California San Francisco;...
Friends of Cancer Research (Friends) recognized Senators Orrin Hatch (R–UT) and Michael Bennet (D–CO) for responding to a recently identified public health issue and proposing a solution to an issue impacting patients and their physicians. Senators Hatch and Bennet jointly introduced the Making...
São Paulo oncologist and immunologist, Nise Yamaguchi, MD, PhD, has been recognized by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) with a Distinguished Award at the IASLC 19th World Conference on Lung Cancer (WCLC) in Toronto. Dr. Yamaguchi was given the Joseph W. Cullen...
As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine by Ghassan K. Abou-Alfa, MD, and colleagues, and reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post, the phase III CELESTIAL trial has demonstrated that cabozantinib (Cabometyx) improved the median overall survival to 10.2 months in comparison to 8 months...
Oncologist, physician, and Professor, Fadlo R. Khuri, MD, FACP, has been recognized by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) with a Distinguished Award at the IASLC 19th World Conference on Lung Cancer (WCLC) in Toronto. Dr. Khuri received the Joseph W. Cullen...
“Patients with follicular lymphoma who relapse early after treatment are a minority of patients, fortunately, but they are clearly patients with a different disease,” according to Jonathon B. Cohen, MD, of Emory University School of Medicine. At Emory’s 2018 Debates and Didactics in Hematology and...
The European Society for medical oncology (ESMO) has granted the 2018 ESMO Award to Jean-Charles Soria, MD, PhD, an international lung cancer expert and pioneer in the development of anticancer drugs. The award was founded in 1985 to acknowledge an ESMO member who has made contributions to the...
Treatment with the cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) 4/6 inhibitor palbociclib (Ibrance) achieved a clinically meaningful improvement in overall survival in patients with hormone receptor (HR)-positive, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-negative advanced breast cancer that has relapsed or ...
Johan F. Vansteenkiste, MD, PhD, of Catholic University Leuven, summarizes a session he co-chaired that included discussion of translating advances in stage IV disease to nonmetastatic lung cancer, TKI approaches in early-stage disease, and integrating immunotherapy and TKIs in stage III disease...
The addition of pembrolizumab (Keytruda) to a standard platinum doublet as first-line therapy improved overall and progression-free survival in patients with metastatic squamous non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), in the primary analysis of KEYNOTE-407.1,2 Furthermore, it did not seem to matter...
Results of the very large, randomized, population-based NELSON trial confirm the value of low-dose computed tomography (CT) screening in people at high risk for developing lung cancer. The protective value of screening was more pronounced in women than in men. These study findings were presented at ...
“PACIFIC is a positive trial, with a 32% improvement in survival, and maintenance durvalumab is a new standard of care,” stated formal discussant Everett Vokes, MD, Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago and a pioneer in the concurrent use of chemotherapy and radiotherapy ...
Several lung cancer trials have shown prolonged progression-free survival with checkpoint inhibitor therapy. For the first time, the phase III PACIFIC trial has found an overall survival benefit for the selective programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) checkpoint inhibitor durvalumab (Imfinzi) vs...
The global burden of cancer is huge and growing. In 2018, there will be > 18 million new cancer cases and 9.6 million deaths.1,2 Although several recent articles have reviewed cancer in developing countries, few have focused on the Palestinian territories. There are several reasons for that,...
In an analysis presented by Davidson et al at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2018 Congress (Abstract 619PD_PR), data were pooled from four UK randomized controlled clinical trials of first-line chemotherapy in esophagogastric cancer, finding significant differences in a...
Nearly 1 in 6 premenopausal women being treated for early-stage breast cancer do not adhere adequately to tamoxifen therapy after 1 year of treatment, potentially putting themselves at increased risk of recurrence and reduced survival, reported a French prospective study at the European Society for ...