John L. Marshall, MD, a global leader in the research and treatment of gastrointestinal cancers, grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, in a family that put high value on education. As a young boy, science was already on his mind; he enjoyed the explorative nature that chemistry and biology offered....
The Tampa Bay area of Florida is a haven for golfers and fishermen looking to unwind under the warm tropical skies. And the clean highways stretching through the scenic west coast of Florida are also a perfect excuse for weekend motorcycle enthusiasts, such as Alan F. List, MD, the President and...
Due to childhood health issues, Sandra J. Horning, MD, formed an opinion about doctors at a young age: They were good people who helped other people. By her early teens, Dr. Horning began to ponder a career in medicine, which offered the possibility of blending her love of science with a career...
As a young boy growing up in the Bronx, Vincent T. DeVita, Jr, MD, admired the local iceman, a thick-muscled guy known as Nunzi, who used to carry a big block of ice on his shoulder with a set of tongs, and effortlessly slide it into the DeVitas’ icebox. “A friend once asked me what I wanted to be...
Numerous challenges and milestones mark the course of an oncology career. Community doctors remember special patients, often speaking about a singular bond that is unique among a profession that deals with life and death daily. Researchers recount long hours of seeming futility and then the...
At the 2007 ASCO Annual Meeting, Lodovico Balducci, MD, received the inaugural B.J. Kennedy Award and Lecture for Scientific Excellence in Geriatric Oncology. Called the “patriarch of geriatric oncology,” Dr. Balducci is widely known in the oncology community for his warm humor and thick Italian...
In 1985, Carolyn R. “Bo” Aldigé founded the Prevent Cancer Foundation in honor of her father, who had died the previous year of head and neck cancer. She started the Foundation in her kitchen with a typewriter, a sheath of carbon copy paper, and a telephone. “I quickly rented an office because a...
The incidence of fractures is “compellingly higher” after receiving hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, according to a retrospective study of patients receiving transplants for treatment of multiple myeloma, other hematologic malignancies, and some solid tumors (mostly breast and ovarian) as...
Martin McMahon, PhD, will join Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) at the University of Utah in August 2015 as Professor in the Department of Dermatology and HCI Senior Director of Preclinical Translation. Dr. McMahon is currently the Efim Guzik Distinguished Professor of Cancer Biology at the...
Providing students and residents with feedback on their medical performance is a key element in their learning and development and ensures that high standards are met, according to Charlene M. Dewey, MD, MEd, FACP, Assistant Dean of Educator Development; Associate Professor of Medical Education and ...
The phase III RAISE trial—reported by Tabernero and colleagues in The Lancet Oncology1 and reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post—demonstrated that ramucirumab (Cyramza), a fully human IgG1 monoclonal antibody to the vascular endothelial growth factor receptor 2 (VEGFR2) extracellular domain, in...
On April 1, 2015, Douglas R. Lowy, MD, became Acting Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), succeeding Harold Varmus, MD, who left NCI to join the faculty of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. (See “The Next Step in a Storied Career,” in the May 25, 2015 issue of The ASCO Post.)...
The past 3 years have witnessed transformative changes in the way that solid tumors and hematologic malignancies are approached, in almost every instance now including consideration of some form of immunomodulation in the first- or later-line therapeutic setting. The greatest success has occurred...
Misinformation is everywhere. Direct your patients to visit www.cancer.net/blog to learn what is science fact and what is science fiction in this blog post on nine common cancer myths. Also, order ASCO Answers Fact Sheet—Myths and Facts About Cancer for your practice at www.cancer.net/estore....
In mid-May, ASCO launched Practical Tips for the Oncology Practice, 6th Edition, a comprehensive resource providing answers to the most commonly asked questions regarding billing, coding, reimbursements, coverage questions, and regulatory policies that affect the day-to-day practice of oncology....
An analysis of Gynecologic Oncology Group (GOG) studies recently reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Tewari and colleagues and reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post showed a survival benefit of intraperitoneal chemotherapy vs intravenous chemotherapy over long-term follow-up in women...
These results are promising. The fact that there were two patients with a complete response caught my eye. This is very exciting in metastatic triple-negative breast cancer. These were heavily pretreated patients; 85% had more than four lines of prior therapy,” said Aditya Bardia, MD, a breast...
Neil Howard Segal, MD, PhD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, who discussed the study at the 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting, emphasized that pembrolizumab (Keytruda) exerted a “clear benefit in patients with mismatch repair deficiency,” based on the “very impressive response rate of...
“What’s past is prologue.” —William Shakespeare Today, a cancer drug under study in a clinical trial is commonly provided for a finite period of time after the study closes to accrual. If that drug were not yet U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved when the study began, the complimentary ...
My life as a cancer survivor and an oncologist has taught me the importance of living every day to the fullest. Sometimes we all need a little reminding to appreciate life to the fullest. When I think of my former patient, Marc, that is what comes to mind. When I was a senior in high school, I was...
The ability to interrogate cancer cells at the genomic, proteomic, immunologic, and metabolomic levels will transform oncology care from one that relies mainly on trial-and-error treatment strategies based on the anatomy of the tumor to one that is more precisely based on the tumor’s molecular...
In 2014, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York opened the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Center for Molecular Oncology with the sole purpose of expediting the translation of novel molecular discoveries into clinical innovations to turn the goal of precision oncology care into...
In a move that reverberated through much of the cancer research community, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) recently announced that it had removed all prostate-specific antigen (PSA) data from its current Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) data submission and associated...
Defining and ensuring the delivery of high-value oncology care has been one of ASCO’s major goals for more than a decade. In 2007, ASCO formed the Task Force on the Cost of Cancer Care, now called the Value in Cancer Care Task Force, to identify the drivers of the increasing costs of oncology care...
Elective neck dissection of node-negative early-stage oral cancer at the time of primary surgery improves overall survival and disease-free survival compared with therapeutic neck dissection (ie, therapeutic neck dissection at the time of nodal relapse, or “watch and wait” approach), according to a ...
Frederick Pei Li, MD, who helped inaugurate the era of cancer genetics by demonstrating that people can inherit a genetic susceptibility to develop certain malignancies, died on June 12 at the age of 75. A Professor at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard T.H. Chan...
Issuing advice for high-value care in screening for five common cancers, the High Value Care Task Force of the American College of Physicians (ACP) stated: “The target audience for this paper is all clinicians. The target patient population is average-risk, asymptomatic patients.” “What we tried...
Finding agreement on high-value cancer screening among organizations publishing screening guidelines, the American College of Physicians (ACP) issued advice listing the least-intensive screening strategies that all the organizations recommend—as well as strategies not recommended—for five common...
Clara D. Bloomfield, MD, FASCO, always sat in the front row at school. She grew up during a rigidly paternalist period in American society, and her early feminist leanings were brushed aside as grade-school adventures. The medical school lecture room of the 1960s was a male-dominated culture, and...
The fundamental challenge in treating children with cancer centers on how to help relieve their suffering while they undergo difficult care. Typically, they do not yet have adult coping skills, and even if they had some ability to cope, many of the issues they face during treatment are...
Johnson & Johnson named Bert Vogelstein, MD, of Johns Hopkins University, Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the winner of the 2015 Dr. Paul Janssen Award for Biomedical Research for his breakthroughs in oncology research, which have spanned more than 2 ...
The quality of mammography images has markedly improved over the past few decades. However, the quality of the interpretation of mammograms remains variable. That said, more than 38 million mammograms are performed annually in the United States. So said Diana Buist, PhD, Senior Scientific...
The benefit from immune-directed therapies in patients with advanced melanoma is not limited to the exploding field of checkpoint inhibitors. According to Robert Andtbacka, MD, Associate Professor of Surgical Oncology, at the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City,...
Researchers at The Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke University are being barraged by patients wishing to enroll in their clinical trial of an engineered poliovirus for recurrent glioblastoma. This comes as a result of a CBS 60 Minutes interview with lead researcher Matthias...
Anastrozole was found to be at least as safe and effective as tamoxifen in preventing breast cancer recurrence in women with ductal carcinoma in situ, in the large NSABP B-35/SWOG-35 study.1 Among all women in the trial, however, the 10-year breast cancer–free interval rates were higher in women...
Study discussant Shanu Modi, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, commented, “Neither T-DM1 [Kadcyla] nor T-DM1 plus pertuzumab [Perjeta] proved to be superior to the old standard of care, taxane plus trastuzumab [Herceptin]. MARIANNE was a valiant trial, but THP (taxane,...
As a regular readers of The ASCO Post know, ASCO is developing an exciting new health information learning system called CancerLinQ™, which will exponentially enlarge our understanding of cancer therapy far beyond what we’ve achieved with our system of clinical trials. Cancer clinical trials have...
I've been fortunate to be strong and healthy for most of my life. In fact, there is no history of any serious illness in my family, which is why I was so unprepared to hear the words “You have breast cancer” 5 years ago. Not only was the diagnosis foreign to me, I had no idea what chemotherapy and...
Amid the encouraging studies reported at the 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting about advances in the treatment of melanoma was a troubling finding about the incidence of melanoma increasing. An analysis of data from nine Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) registries found that the incidence...
INSIDE THE BLACK BOX is an occasional column providing insight into the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and its policies and procedures. In this installment, FDA supervisory toxicologist Todd Palmby, PhD, and pharmacologist Eias Zahalka, PhD, MBA, discuss the approach taken in the Office of ...
Question 1: In this case, what is the most appropriate next best test? Correct Answer: B. Peripheral blood smear examination. Expert Perspective In the appropriate clinical setting, information obtained from a carefully examined peripheral blood smear film is indispensable. The peripheral blood...
The ASCO Post is pleased to present Hematology Expert Review, an occasional feature that includes a case report detailing a particular hematologic condition followed by questions. Answers to each question with expert commentary can be found in the sidebar. In this installment, we present the case...
Laura van’t Veer, PhD, Co-leader of the University of California San Francisco Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center (HDFCCC) Breast Oncology Program, and her team at the Netherlands Cancer Institute were awarded the European Inventor Award for the invention of a gene-based tissue test,...
Geriatrics for the Oncologist is guest edited by Stuart Lichtman, MD, FACP, FASCO, and developed in collaboration with the International Society of Geriatric Oncology (SIOG). Visit SIOG.org for more on geriatric oncology. The elderly population in the United States is growing, and by the year...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Andrea Bezjak, MD, of Princess Margaret Cancer Center, Toronto, and colleagues,1 ASCO has recently endorsed the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) evidence-based guideline on external-beam radiotherapy for patients with locally...
Approximately 10% to 15% of patients with advanced non–small cell lung (NSCLC) cancer have mutations in the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) in tumor cells. Specific therapies to inhibit the activity of EGFR-mutated NSCLC have now been clearly shown to improve response rate and...
Some years after successful treatment of a childhood cancer, a 16-year-old survivor required surgery to replace both hip joints, which were damaged from therapy containing steroids. An x-ray of the teenager’s destroyed joints is a stark reminder of the serious health challenges faced by cancer...
Cyrus Ghajar, PhD, a metastatic breast cancer researcher at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, has received a $4.1 million Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program (BCRP) “Era of Hope” Scholar Award. The Department of Defense’s BCRP is the second biggest funder of breast cancer...
At the 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting, both ASCO and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) unveiled details of new precision medicine trials that will greatly expand the number of patients with cancer who are benefiting from targeted agents. The trials will match a patient’s tumor molecular profile with an ...
Daniel G. Coit, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, and Chair of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Melanoma Guidelines Panel, discussed the findings reported by Lewin et al at the ASCO Annual Meeting. “This is a small retrospective study examining a prospective...