In an interim analysis of a phase III trial (RxPONDER) reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Kevin Kalinsky, MD, MS, of Winship Cancer Institute, and colleagues found that the addition of adjuvant chemotherapy to endocrine therapy improved invasive disease–free survival among...
Guest Editor’s Note: Mindfulness has gained immense popularity in recent years. Growing evidence suggests the benefits of mindfulness-based practices, which include concentration meditation and guided imagery, for managing symptoms associated with cancer and its treatments. In this article,...
Updated results from the pivotal KEYNOTE-522 trial have confirmed the benefit of neoadjuvant therapy with pembrolizumab plus chemotherapy in patients with early triple-negative breast cancer.1 The results were presented at the 2021 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium by Peter Schmid, MD, PhD,...
Anthony El-Khoueiry, MD, Member of the Section of Gastrointestinal Cancers, Director of the phase I program, and Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California and USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, said the findings of the...
Patients with advanced, unresectable hepatocellular carcinoma may be gaining another first-line treatment option. In the global phase III HIMALAYA trial, a single priming dose of tremelimumab plus regular-interval durvalumab significantly improved overall survival, according to Ghassan K....
Nilofer Azad, MD, Professor of Oncology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Co-Director of Cancer Genetics and Epigenetics at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, Baltimore, was invited to discuss the results of the phase III TOPAZ-1 study, which found an overall survival...
Regulations that are developed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) must have some shelf-life before revisions are considered. The FDA has several mechanisms to provide patients with more rapid access to medicines. One such pathway is accelerated approval. Backward Glance at Accelerated...
Over the past 7 years, the introduction of combined endocrine therapy with cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) 4/6 inhibitors resulted in a dramatic improvement in outcomes for patients with metastatic, hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative breast cancer. Early attempts to modulate the cell cycle with ...
An updated analysis of the phase III CANDOR study—recently reported by Usmani et al and summarized in this issue of The ASCO Post—confirmed a significant progression-free survival benefit for the combination of daratumumab, carfilzomib, and dexamethasone (KdD) over carfilzomib and dexamethasone...
The combination of the BRAF inhibitor encorafenib with cetuximab and nivolumab produced responses in 50% of patients and disease control in 96% of patients with microsatellite-stable BRAF V600E–mutated metastatic colorectal cancer in a phase I/II trial reported at the 2022 ASCO Gastrointestinal...
The 2021 Annual Conference of the International Society of Geriatric Oncology (SIOG) was held on November 4–5. Although participants could not join the conference in person, attendees could still stay informed about the latest developments in geriatric oncology through the virtual platform. The...
Adjuvant platinum-based chemotherapy for early-stage non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is currently almost an afterthought and is taken for granted as a standard of care for patients with stage II to IIIA NSCLC after resection. The earliest meta-analysis, published in 1995,1 gave the first hint of ...
A greater understanding of the mutational landscape in non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) has identified key oncogenes, such as EGFR, ALK, ROS, RET, and BRAF, among others. These discoveries, coupled with the availability of specific targeted small-molecule inhibitors, have transformed the...
Multiple comparisons of traditional cytotoxic chemotherapy combinations that began decades ago led to the adoption of the platinum plus fluorouracil doublet as the standard of care for treatment of recurrent or metastatic esophageal cancer.1 Other combinations created by the addition and/or...
After almost a century of limited efficacy of cancer immunotherapy,1 the breakthrough happened in 2012 with the discovery of immune checkpoint inhibitors,2,3 leading to the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo. Yet about 40% of patients on immune...
As a first-line treatment of inter-mediate- or high-risk diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, the addition of the antibody-drug conjugate polatuzumab vedotin-piiq to standard-of-care therapy resulted in a 27% reduction in the relative risk of disease progression, relapse, or death, with a similar safety...
The ASCO Post invited myeloma expert Philip L. McCarthy, MD, Director of the Transplant and Cellular Therapy Program at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, Buffalo, New York, to comment on the trials evaluating early detection of myeloma at the 2021 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual ...
Updated results of the SWOG S1007 RxPONDER trial confirmed the key takeaway from the previous analysis: adjuvant chemotherapy benefits premenopausal women but not postmenopausal women with hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative disease, one to three positive lymph nodes, and a 21-gene Oncotype DX ...
As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Thierry Facon, MD, of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Lille, and colleagues, a prespecified interim analysis of overall survival in the pivotal phase III MAIA trial has shown a significant benefit with the addition of daratumumab to...
Invited discussant Ian Chau, MD, Consultant Medical Oncologist at The Royal Marsden Hospital in London and Surrey in the United Kingdom, said the findings from COSMIC-3121 are not mature enough to establish cabozantinib/atezolizumab as a new front-line option for advanced hepatocellular carcinoma...
Achieving undetectable measurable residual disease (MRD) is an important milestone in the treatment of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) as well as those with other hematologic malignancies undergoing treatment. Now a small phase II study, presented at the 2021 American Society of...
Although research so far has failed to uncover the root causes of the development of young-onset colorectal cancer, what is certain is that although colorectal cancer rates are declining in older adults, they are on a steady rise in people younger than age 50, especially those between the ages of...
Updating its 2016 recommendation on the use of aspirin to prevent cardiovascular disease and colorectal cancer, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) issued a draft recommendation statement. It noted the potential harms of daily aspirin, with the most serious being bleeding in the...
In part 1 of this two-part review, we looked at early pioneers in the field of medical oncology in Europe, as well as the development of international cooperative trials and the formation of European oncology societies (see related articles below). In part 2, we explore how the field of medical...
Our goal with this review of the pivotal years of oncology in Europe is to acknowledge the tremendous contributions of the early leaders in the field and to help young investigators learn from the past to better cope with the inevitable challenges of today and tomorrow. “On ne connaît pas...
Lung health in adults has traditionally been defined as the absence of disease, but it may be time to rethink this paradigm, according to Ravi Kalhan, MD, MS, Director of the Northwestern Asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Program at Northwestern University Feinberg School of...
The management of recurrent and/or metastatic head and neck cancer is complex. Historically, patients with squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck with local or regional recurrence were considered for salvage surgery or reirradiation (in high-volume centers or centers of expertise), with an...
The 2021 Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University Symposium: Updates in the Management of Head and Neck Cancer explored current paradigms for the multidisciplinary treatment of head and neck cancer.1 Moderated by Nabil F. Saba, MD, FACP, the Lynne and Howard Halpern Chair in Head and Neck...
The final overall survival results from the KEYNOTE-355 study showed a statistically significant 27% reduction in the risk of death for patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer whose tumors were strongly positive for PD-L1, defined as a combined positive score (CPS) of at least 10 and ...
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, Ting Bao, MD, DABMA, MS, and Jyothirmai Gubili, MS, focus on shiitake mushroom ...
National surveys consistently show that spirituality and religion are important components in the lives of most Americans, with more than 90% of adults expressing a belief in God and more than 70% identifying religion as one of the most important influences in their lives.1 Studies also show that...
Estrogen receptor–positive breast cancer is the most common type of breast cancer, diagnosed in more than 2.3 million women around the world each year, including more than 200,000 in the United States alone. Adjuvant endocrine therapy is a mainstay of treatment for these millions of women and is a...
Although cancer in adolescents and young adults (AYAs), defined by the National Cancer Institute as those between the ages of 15 and 39, is relatively rare—in 2020 nearly 90,000 AYAs were diagnosed with cancer and about 9,300 died of the disease1—and 5-year relative survival rates are high, between ...
In an Austrian Breast and Colorectal Cancer Study Group phase III trial (ABCSG-16/SALSA) reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Michael Gnant, MD, of the Comprehensive Cancer Center, Medical University of Vienna, and colleagues found no difference in disease-free survival with 2 vs 5...
Renal cell carcinoma is a common malignancy among men and women in the United States.1 The incidence continues to increase with the ever-increasing use of contemporary medical imaging. Although many patients who present with localized disease are cured with definitive surgery, some patients develop ...
As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine by Toni K. Choueiri, MD, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and colleagues, an interim analysis of the phase III KEYNOTE-564 trial has showed improved disease-free survival with adjuvant pembrolizumab vs placebo after nephrectomy in high-risk...
Inhibition of the androgen receptor pathway (AR) with novel hormonal therapies such as abiraterone acetate has greatly improved outcomes for patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer in recent years. However, through numerous mechanisms, tumors ultimately develop resistance...
During an International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) press briefing, Paul Wheatley-Price, MRCP, commented as the patient advocate on the panel. Dr. Wheatley-Price is Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Ottawa, lung cancer disease site lead at Ottawa Hospital...
Low-dose lung cancer screening by computed tomography (CT) is associated with a 16% relative reduction in lung cancer mortality over no lung cancer screening of high-risk individuals, based on a meta-analysis conducted by investigators with the United Kingdom Lung Cancer Screening (UKLS) trial.1...
Previously treated patients with HER2-positive non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) achieved encouraging response rates and duration of response to the antibody-drug conjugate fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki (T-DXd) in the phase II DESTINY-Lung01 trial. These results were reported at the European...
Newly identified genetic abnormalities in acute myeloid leukemia (AML), as well as therapies that can target some of those abnormalities, are now available as the landscape for treatment continues to evolve. During the 2021 National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Annual Congress: Hematologic...
In the United States, the incidence-based mortality related to non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) has decreased by approximately 3% each year since 2008 in men; during the same period, the mortality in women decreased by 2% to 4% annually.1 Although multiple factors are likely responsible for the...
Newly identified genetic abnormalities in AML have led to novel therapies that can target some of them, as the landscape for treatment continues to evolve. During the 2021 National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Annual Congress: Hematologic Malignancies, Alice S. Mims MD, presented updates in...
Although patients with multiple myeloma can respond to initial treatment, once a patient has had three or four different types of therapy, and the disease is deemed relapsed or refractory, treatment becomes more complicated. This is related to both clinical characteristics, as patients may develop...
The invited discussant of BrighTNess,1 Monica Arnedos, MD, PhD, Head of the Breast Cancer Research Program at the Institut Bergonié in Bordeaux, France, said the findings add to growing support for using carboplatin in triple-negative breast cancer, but their clinical application could be...
Adjuvant immunotherapy with atezolizumab after standard chemotherapy improved disease-free survival and time to locoregional and distant relapse compared with best supportive care in prespecified subgroups of patients with stage II to IIIA non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), according to an...
“Nodal status remains the single most important prognostic marker in outcomes for women with estrogen receptor–positive, HER2-negative breast cancer. For that reason, it makes sense to think about optimizing adjuvant therapy, including endocrine treatments, chemotherapy, and targeted therapy,”...
“KRAS G12C inhibitors as monotherapy yield a relatively low overall response rate, but when you combine them with an EGFR [epidermal growth factor receptor] inhibitor, the response rate is nearly double,” said Federica Di Nicolantonio, MD, PhD, Professor of Oncology at the University of Turin in...
Guest Editor’s Note: Cancer-related cognitive difficulties, experienced by many cancer survivors, include perceived or objective deficits in memory, attention, and concentration, which can negatively impact quality of life. Given the important role that healthful sleep plays in cognitive processes, ...
The number of deaths related to breast cancer are increasing at an alarming pace worldwide. According to a World Health Organization (WHO) 2020 report, approximately 2,088,849 new cases and 627,000 deaths related to breast cancer occurred in 2018.1 More than 55% of these deaths occurred in low- to ...