Female gynecologic oncologists have reported in a survey that having a department chair of the same gender is no buffer against gender harassment or discrimination in the workplace. The information comes from a survey of the “Women of Gynecologic Oncology” Facebook group and was reported in March...
National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, has selected Marie A. Bernard, MD, as NIH’s next Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity (COSWD). Dr. Bernard will lead NIH’s effort to promote diversity, inclusiveness, and equity throughout the biomedical research...
David Cunningham, MD, Consultant Medical Oncologist, Head of the Gastrointestinal and Lymphoma Unit, and Director of Clinical Research at The Royal Marsden in London and Surrey in the United Kingdom, discussed CheckMate 6481 as well as the ESCORT-1st study of the PD-L1 inhibitor camrelizumab in...
As first-line treatment of advanced esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, nivolumab-containing regimens improved overall survival over standard-of-care chemotherapy, according to the first results of the global phase III CheckMate 648 trial presented at the 2021 ASCO Annual Meeting by Ian Chau, MD,...
Comments on the OUTBACK trial were provided by invited discussant Kunle Odunsi, MD, PhD, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Dean for Oncology, and Director of the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center. Lilian T. Gien, MD, MSc, Associate Professor of Oncology at the...
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Street Neighborhood Health Center (HSNHC) in Dorchester, Massachusetts, have entered into an agreement to connect patients to cancer prevention, education, diagnosis, and treatment services. This program, based out of Dana-Farber’s Cancer Care Equity...
In 2016, 2 years before I was diagnosed with stage III estrogen and progesterone receptor–positive, HER2-negative, invasive ductal carcinoma in situ in my left breast, I had felt a mass in my right breast that turned out to be a benign fibroid. When I felt a mass in my left breast one morning while ...
Multiple studies have shown that sexuality and intimacy problems are common among patients with cancer, often beginning at the time of diagnosis and persisting through the continuum of care into the survivorship setting. Although these problems have been well documented, many patients and survivors ...
The University of North Carolina (UNC) Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center has established the Pancreatic Cancer Center of Excellence to bring together cancer center faculty with a broad range of expertise—from laboratory, translational, and clinical research to drug development, biostatistics,...
“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.” —Mark Twain 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...
In women with locally advanced cervical cancer, adjuvant chemotherapy adds no benefit to standard cisplatin-based chemoradiation, results of the international phase III OUTBACK study have shown,1 as reported at the 2021 ASCO Annual Meeting by Linda R. Mileshkin, MD, Professor of Medical Oncology at ...
As our population rapidly ages, the burden of cancer incidence increases accordingly, creating an urgent need for greater and more incisive research on the diagnosis, treatment, and survivorship issues for older adults with cancer. Given the numerous challenges faced by today’s busy oncologists, a...
Invited discussant of the KEYNOTE-564 trial, Rana R. McKay, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine and Urology at the University of California San Diego, offered these comments about these trial results. “This is a positive study, showing a 32% reduction in the risk of recurrence or death with...
Adjuvant pembrolizumab following surgery significantly improved disease-free survival compared with placebo among patients with high-risk clear cell renal cell carcinoma (RCC), according to the international phase III KEYNOTE-564 study presented at the Plenary session during the 2021 ASCO Annual...
Morocco is an Arab country in North Africa. It covers 716,550 square kilometers and has a population of nearly 36 million. The median age is 29.3 years. Morocco’s estimated gross domestic product (GDP) in 2019 was $122 million. As of 2019, Morocco’s health budget was equivalent to 4.5% of the total ...
When I interviewed for my current post as a first-time consultant in medical oncology in the United Kingdom, I was asked about my 5-year career plan. I remember some detail of my reply, but I don’t think it even remotely encompassed the depth of insight I would gain from the patients I’ve treated...
Mark G. Kris, MD, FASCO, Chief of the Thoracic Oncology Service and the William and Joy Ruane Chair in Thoracic Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, commented on the excitement in the field of lung cancer about the new drugs targeting KRAS. Sotorasib is one of several new...
Cynthia M. Yoshida, MD, is one of six winners of a national award recognizing health-care providers and institutions for their work to increase colorectal cancer screening rates. Dr. Yoshida, a gastroenterologist and medical leader of the University of Virginia (UVA) Cancer Center’s Colorectal...
This past October, in a virtually held ceremony of the General Assembly of the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC), Anil K. D’Cruz, MBBS, MS, DNB, FRCS (Hon), Director of Oncology at Apollo Hospitals in Mumbai, Chennai, and Delhi, India, began his 2-year tenure as President of the global...
The breakthrough KRAS-specific inhibitor sotorasib achieved responses in patients with KRAS G12C–mutated non–small lung cancer (NSCLC) who had experienced disease progression on platinum-based chemotherapy, immunotherapy, or both treatments. The objective response rate was 37.1%, and responses...
Although both incidence and mortality rates in colorectal cancer have been declining among people older than 65 by 3.3% and 3% annually, respectively, among individuals younger than age 50, the incidence rate has risen about 2% annually, and death rates have increased by 1.3% annually.1 Colorectal...
Formal discussant of OlympiA, Nadine M. Tung, MD, Director of Breast Medical Oncology and the Cancer Genetics and Prevention Program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, was enthusiastic about the ability of olaparib to improve invasive disease–free survival and...
Adjuvant therapy with the PARP inhibitor olaparib for 1 year extended disease-free survival in patients with high-risk early-stage HER2-negative breast cancer with BRCA1/2 germline (inherited) mutations, according to a prespecified interim analysis of the phase III OlympiA trial presented at the...
Session moderator during the 2021 American Society of Breast Surgeons Annual Meeting, Sarah Blair, MD, FACS, Vice Chair of Academic Affairs for the Department of Surgery at University of California San Diego, urged widespread dissemination of these survey findings. “I was struck by how important...
Gaurav Goyal, MD, of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, reports on findings from a large multi-institutional database study, which showed there was no apparent difference in overall survival between R-CHOP and R-EPOCH among patients with advanced-stage MYC-rearranged, double-hit, or...
Most survivors of head and neck squamous cell cancers report that their sense of taste is dulled, changed, or lost during radiation treatment. In a study of taste and smell dysfunction in 40 cancer survivors, scientists found that the tips of these individuals' tongues were significantly less...
A study published by Strother et al in BJU International found that patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer can safely receive cisplatin-based neoadjuvant chemotherapy, even when their tumors are blocking their kidneys. The findings suggest that patients with the most serious type of this...
A study by Lin et al comparing patients with colon cancer enrolled in the U.S. Military Health System, which provides universal health-care to its beneficiaries, with those in the general population has found that patients in the Military Health System had an 18% lower risk of death compared with...
Over the past month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Priority Review to therapies for multiple myeloma, cervical cancer, chemotherapy-induced neutropenia, and myelofibrosis. The FDA also granted a number of Breakthrough Therapy designations, including those for treatments in ...
Non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) accounts for 80% to 85% of cases of lung cancer; when it is diagnosed early, there is a 5-year survival rate of 50% to 80%. Black patients have a lower overall incidence of NSCLC than White patients but are more likely to be diagnosed at later stages. They also...
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 joint position statement released today. To date, clinical trials...
A study published by Sharp et al in The Breast Journal suggests that some patients with breast cancer may be able to forgo certain testing procedures after neoadjuvant chemotherapy without increasing their risk of cancer recurrence. Prior studies on detecting whether breast cancer has spread to...
New research has uncovered substantial differences in the rates of childhood cancers when considering a single year of age rather than grouping several years together. The study, published by Marcotte et al in the journal Cancer, also found that minority children seem to have different risks than...
In a primary analysis of the phase III GLOW study, a once-daily, all-oral, fixed-duration dose of ibrutinib and venetoclax for chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL)/small lymphocytic lymphoma (SLL) resulted in superior progression-free survival than treatment with chlorambucil and obinutuzumab. Arnon...
In a prospective cross-sectional study reported in JCO Global Oncology, Gupta et al found that women with ovarian cancer in India had a high prevalence of pathogenic or likely pathogenic BRCA variants. As stated by the investigators: “There are deficient data on prevalence of germline mutations in...
Patients with early-stage breast cancer may be at low risk of dying of their disease, but they experience a high burden of physical and psychological symptoms long after their treatment has ended, according to data presented during the 2021 American Society of Breast Surgeons Annual Meeting.1...
In a retrospective cohort study reported by Win et al in The Lancet Oncology, researchers in the International Mismatch Repair Consortium found marked variation in the risk of colorectal cancer in families with Lynch syndrome carrying the same pathogenic variant in DNA mismatch repair genes. The...
The invited discussant of the JUPITER-02 study was Anthony TC Chan, MD, the Li Shu Fan Medical Foundation Professor of Clinical Oncology at Hong King Cancer Institute and Sir YK Pao Centre for Cancer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He noted that anti–PD-1/L1 therapies are at the forefront...
A new first-line standard of care may be emerging for recurrent or metastatic nasopharyngeal carcinoma, based on the findings of the global phase III JUPITER-02 trial presented at the 2021 ASCO Annual Meeting by investigators from China.1 In the study, toripalimab, an anti–PD-1 monoclonal antibody, ...
Zanubrutinib—a second-generation Bruton's tyrosine kinase (BTK) inhibitor—significantly improved response rates and delayed disease progression as compared to the standard of care, ibrutinib, in patients with relapsed or refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia or small lymphocytic lymphoma...
From routine axillary lymph node dissection to sentinel lymph node surgery, the use of axillary surgery continues to evolve in breast cancer. Recently, surgical oncologists have begun to consider avoiding axillary surgery completely in patients with a low risk of node-positive disease as well as in ...
On February 12, 2021, the cyclin-dependent kinase 4/6 (CDK4/6) inhibitor trilaciclib was approved for use to decrease the incidence of chemotherapy-induced myelosuppression in adult patients when administered prior to a platinum/etoposide–containing regimen or topotecan-containing regimen for...
In the treatment of relapsed/refractory follicular lymphoma, a comparison of data from the ZUMA-5 trial with those of the external control cohort of the SCHOLAR-5 trial showed substantial improvement in all clinical endpoints with axicabtagene ciloleucel. John G. Gribben, DSc, FRCP, FRCPath,...
In a new study designed to provide a more comprehensive picture of how a diverse cohort of patients with gynecologic cancer are affected by financial distress, nearly half reported financial toxicity, which was associated with economic cost-coping strategies. These findings were reported by Esselen ...
In an updated analysis of the phase III MAIA trial, the addition of daratumumab to lenalidomide and dexamethasone resulted in a statistically significant overall survival benefit over lenalidomide/dexamethasone alone in patients with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma who are ineligible for...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology and during the 2021 ASCO Annual Meeting by Ingrid A. Mayer, MD, and colleagues, the phase III ECOG-ACRIN EA1131 trial investigated the use of adjuvant platinum vs capecitabine in patients with basal subtype triple-negative breast cancer and residual...
A mathematical tool may help to examine how doctors may coordinate available treatments for high-grade serous ovarian cancer. Published by Gu et al in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the new analysis showed that patients who can have complete debulking surgery first, with...
Henry Kuerer, MD, PhD, FACS, a cancer surgeon and researcher at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, told The ASCO Post that although this study is not practice-changing, it does offer a potential option for patients. “The advantage of this technique is that the procedure takes just...
Cryoablation is emerging as a new alternative to surgical excision for smaller early-stage, low-risk breast cancers in appropriately selected patient populations, according to data presented during the 2021 American Society of Breast Surgeons Annual Meeting.1 Early 3-year results of the multicenter ...
The invited discussant of EMPOWER-Cervical 1 was Mansoor Raza Mirza, MD, Chief Oncologist at Copenhagen University Hospital and Chairman of the European Network of Gynaecological Oncology Trials group (ENGOT). Dr. Mirza called the findings “amazing” and predicted they will “usher in a new era” in...