A particular molecular pathway permits stem cells in pediatric bone cancers to grow rapidly and aggressively, according to researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center and its Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center. These findings were published by Basu-Roy et al in Nature Communications. Study...
Efforts at implementing survivorship care plans have met with limited success in oncology practice, in part due to the time required to complete survivorship care plans, lack of role clarity, and lack of reimbursement for time to complete the documents. In response, ASCO convened a Survivorship...
Weekly paclitaxel is used as second-line treatment in advanced gastric cancer, including HER2-positive disease, in Asian countries. In the phase III TyTAN trial in Asian patients reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Satoh et al assessed the addition of the anti-HER2 agent lapatinib...
A phase III trial reported in 2013 showed noninferiority of pazopanib (Votrient) vs sunitinib (Sutent) for progression-free survival in first-line treatment of clear cell metastatic renal cell carcinoma. In a letter to the editor in The New England Journal of Medicine, Motzer et al provided the...
“Use of e-cigarettes does not discourage, and may encourage, conventional cigarette use among US adolescents.” This was the conclusion of a cross-sectional analysis of survey data from a representative sample of middle and high school students who completed the National Youth Tobacco...
In a prospective study reported as a research letter in JAMA, Meretoja et al found that 50% of patients had mild pain and 16% moderate or severe pain at 12 months after surgery for breast cancer. Factors predictive of pain were chronic preoperative pain, preoperative pain in the area of surgery,...
According to the final results of the phase III CAIRO3 trial by the Dutch Colorectal Cancer Group, maintenance treatment with capecitabine plus bevacizumab (Avastin) significantly delayed progression compared to observation in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer, and in a subset of patients, ...
Final results of the phase III NeoALTTO trial have confirmed the value of pathologic complete response to dual HER2 blockade in the neoadjuvant setting. The achievement of pathologic complete response was associated with significantly improved event-free survival and overall survival in some women...
Data suggest that Src kinase-mediated interactions between prostate cancer cells and osteoclasts might promote bone metastasis and that the Src kinase inhibitor dasatinib (Sprycel) might exhibit synergy with docetaxel in prostate cancer. In a phase III trial (READY) reported in The Lancet Oncology, ...
Previously reported results of the phase III EORTC intergroup 40983 trial showed that perioperative chemotherapy with FOLFOX4 (leucovorin, fluorouracil [5-FU], and oxaliplatin) increased progression-free survival compared with surgery alone in patients with initially resectable liver metastases...
German investigators reported at the 2013 Breast Cancer Symposium in San Francisco that an abridged magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) protocol can accurately detect cancers among women whose mammographic screenings were negative (Abstract 1). MRI, therefore, may reveal the type of tumor that...
The investigational agent brivanib is a selective dual inhibitor of VEGF and fibroblast growth factor receptors, both implicated in hepatocellular carcinoma. In a trial (BRISK-PS) reported in Journal of Clinical Oncology, Josep M. Llovet, MD, of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New...
A randomized phase III study found that the targeted drug sorafenib (Nexavar) stalls disease progression by 5 months in patients with metastatic differentiated thyroid cancer that has progressed despite standard radioactive iodine therapy. If approved in this setting by the U.S. Food and Drug...
When retinoblastoma is diagnosed in racial and ethnic minority children whose families don't have private health insurance, it often takes a more invasive, potentially life-threatening course than in other children, probably because of delays in diagnosis, researchers at Dana-Farber/Children's...