Outcomes in patients with triple-class–failure relapsed and refractory multiple myeloma who experience disease progression on immunomodulatory agents, proteasome inhibitors, and CD38 antibodies are dismal. Most recently, early results of three anti-B-cell maturation antigen (BCMA) chimeric antigen...
Leading cancer scientists working with the New York Genome Center (NYGC) announced that grants are being awarded to fund six projects that address the role of ethnicity in several major cancer types, taking advantage of the diversity of patients being treated at health-care institutions throughout...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Cristina Saura, MD, of Vall d’Hebron University Hospital, Barcelona, and colleagues, the phase III NALA trial has shown significantly prolonged progression-free survival with the irreversible pan-HER tyrosine kinase inhibitor neratinib plus...
Findings from a study among patients with melanoma randomly assigned to observation following removal of a positive sentinel lymph node “strongly support the therapeutic effect of the sentinel lymph node biopsy in providing long-term regional nodal disease control in the large majority of...
City of Hope is investigating an innovative treatment for patients with cancer and COVID-19 by repurposing leflunomide, an anti-inflammatory drug for rheumatoid arthritis that is inexpensive and has few serious side effects, in a new clinical trial. Patients treated for cancer in the past 2 years...
As reported inThe Lancet Oncology by Michael C. Heinrich, MD, of the VA Portland Health Care System and the Oregon Health & Science University Knight Cancer Institute, and colleagues, the phase I NAVIGATOR trial showed that the PDGFRA and KIT kinase inhibitor avapritinib produced a high...
Age is not just a number when it comes to prognosis for invasive breast cancer. According to data presented during the 2020 Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) International Conference on Surgical Cancer Care, age at diagnosis of breast cancer is a highly prognostic clinical variable that warrants...
Christopher Anker, MD, a radiation oncologist at The University of Vermont Medical Center and Associate Professor at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont, Burlington, told The ASCO Post that although the benefit to overall survival disappeared with time likely due to a power ...
Improved local-regional tumor control may not be enough to justify the increased morbidity of adding neoadjuvant radiation to chemotherapy in esophageal and gastroesophageal junction cancers, according to a pair of studies presented during the 2020 Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) International...
Findings from a retrospective cohort study could fuel the debate over the use of adjuvant chemotherapy in stage II colon cancer, according to data presented during the virtual edition of the 2020 Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) International Conference on Surgical Cancer Care.1 Results of the...
In a demonstration of global collaboration, clinician-scientists have pooled data from 121 hospitals in 8 countries to find that inexpensive, widely available steroids may improve the odds that very sick patients with COVID-19 will survive the illness. The findings were made through the Randomized...
The late effects of adolescent and young adults (AYA) with lymphomas are considerable and have not been given much attention, according to Theresa Keegan, MD, of the University of California at Davis. “Lymphoma is one of the most commonly occurring malignancies in AYAs,” she stated. “The 5-year...
“Good morning! I’m Dr. Saksena. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” I wave my introduction as I enter the room. Two women sit beside each other. One of them wears a mask that reads “lipstick optional,” and the other dons a surgical mask. This is a new visit for breast cancer, but I haven’t yet deciphered ...
At the 2020 Debates and Didactics in Hematology and Oncology Virtual Conference, sponsored by Emory University School of Medicine and Winship Cancer Institute, Pamela Allen, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Emory, described recent trials on therapeutic approaches that are informative on this...
A review of the 2019 Drug Trials Snapshots Report1 from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) showed that although female participation in clinical trials grew to 72% from 56% in the FDA’s 2018 Drug Trials Snapshots Report,2 ethnic minority participation in clinical trials actually declined...
Nivolumab monotherapy showed high response and disease control rates in patients with pathogenic exonuclease domain POLE (edPOLE)-mutated, mismatch repair (MMR)-proficient advanced tumors containing confirmed pathogenic mutations, according to findings presented by Benoit J.C. Rousseau, MD, PhD, of ...
In the phase IIa plasmaMATCH platform trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Nicholas C. Turner, MD, and colleagues found that circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) provided accurate genotyping that permitted selection of directed therapies in patients with advanced breast cancer. Study Details The...
The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) has released the 10th edition of its annual Cancer Progress Report. The report highlights how cancer research, largely supported by federal investments in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), is...
The challenge in treating patients with borderline resectable pancreatic cancer is how to render tumors resectable and how to achieve the negative surgical margins that enhance long-term survival odds. Fortunately, neoadjuvant chemotherapy is helping to achieve these important goals, according to...
Combined use of aspirin, metformin, and statins may be associated with decreased lung cancer incidence and mortality, according to a study published by Kang et al in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology. Study Methods The aim of this study was to investigate the associations of the three agents with...
In a phase I trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Andrea B. Apolo, MD, and colleagues found that the combination of cabozantinib and nivolumab, as well as the combination of cabozantinib/nivolumab plus ipilimumab, produced durable responses in patients with metastatic urothelial...
Today, the American Medical Association (AMA), American Hospital Association (AHA), and American Nurses Association (ANA) released a joint statement on the amount of deaths caused by the coronavirus in the United States. Today we mark a somber milestone as more than 200,000 people in the United...
As reported in European Urology by Matthew R. Smith, MD, and colleagues, the final analysis of phase III SPARTAN trial has shown significant prolongation of overall survival with apalutamide vs placebo in patients with nonmetastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer and prostate-specific antigen ...
As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine by Wu et al, the phase III ADAURA trial has shown significantly prolonged disease-free survival with adjuvant osimertinib vs placebo in patients with resected EGFR-mutant non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). These findings were also presented during ...
In a single-center Indian phase III trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Naik et al found that the addition of olanzapine to standard antiemetic treatment significantly increased the rate of complete response (CR; defined as no vomiting or use of rescue medication) among children and ...
“Studies that have compared neoadjuvant endocrine therapy with neoadjuvant chemotherapy have shown low pathologic complete response rates with both approaches. However, the rates of breast-conserving surgery have been shown to be slightly higher with neoadjuvant endocrine therapy,” Kelly Hunt, MD,...
A new report examining cancer in adolescents and young adults (AYAs, defined as diagnoses occurring between the ages of 15 and 39) provides updated estimates of the contemporary cancer burden in this age group, with predictions that 89,500 cases and 9,270 deaths will occur in this group in 2020 in...
Immune therapy for advanced gastroesophageal cancer has taken a leap forward by showing its value in the first-line setting, according to two studies in which nivolumab and pembrolizumab, both given with chemotherapy, significantly improved overall survival vs chemotherapy alone. The studies,...
The Lung ART trial was designed to demonstrate whether there was any benefit to the routine use of modern mediastinal postoperative radiotherapy in patients with non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) following complete resection and (neo)adjuvant chemotherapy. No difference in disease-free survival...
Patient advocates and medical professionals in more than 20 countries have come together for the second annual World Gynecologic Oncology Day (World GO Day), taking place today, September 20. A project of the European Society of Gynaecological Oncology (ESGO) and the European Network of...
In a phase I clinical trial for patients with advanced solid cancers marked by KRAS G12C mutations, the KRAS G12C inhibitor sotorasib (AMG 510) showed manageable toxicities and durable clinical benefits. Results from the trial were published in The New England Journal of Medicine, and data from the ...
Access to cancer treatments is highly unequal across Europe, both for new drugs in development (due to disparities in access to clinical trials) and for currently approved drugs (due to disparities in health-care spending by different countries), according to results from two studies being...
In a phase II study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Kyriakopoulos et al found that use of quantitative total bone imaging with fluorine-18 (F-18)–sodium fluoride (NaF) positron-emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) helped identify heterogeneity of response in bone lesions...
In a phase II trial reported in JAMA Oncology, Sara M. Tolaney, MD, MPH, and colleagues found that the addition of pembrolizumab to eribulin did not improve progression-free survival in women with hormone receptor (HR)-positive, HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer. As stated by the...
There are approximately 25 million foreign-born immigrants living in the United States, which is more than 13% of the nation’s total population. Of these individuals, it is estimated that about 11 million are undocumented; by far, the largest group of this immigrant undocumented population is...
In a single-institution study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Hong et al found that mandatory twice-weekly evaluations reduced the need for unplanned acute care visits among patients undergoing outpatient radiotherapy or chemoradiation who were identified as being at high risk for...
The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) released its inaugural Cancer Disparities Progress Report 2020, which found that while overall cancer death rates are declining and the number of survivors is reaching record highs, progress against cancer is not benefiting everyone equally, with...
As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine by Karim Fizazi, MD, and colleagues, the phase III ARAMIS trial has shown significantly prolonged overall survival with darolutamide vs placebo in men with nonmetastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. The previously reported primary analysis ...
In individual participant data and trial-level meta-analyses reported in JAMA Network Open, Gulia et al found that disease-free survival with adjuvant trastuzumab given for less than 1 year was noninferior to 1 year of trastuzumab therapy in patients with early breast cancer. In addition, the...
Clinicians who treat multiple myeloma can anticipate a host of new treatments: melflufen, cereblon E3 ligase (CEL) modulators, antibody-drug conjugates, bispecific antibodies, and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies. Kenneth C. Anderson, MD, Director of the Jerome Lipper Multiple...
In the treatment of adults with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), use of newer antibodies and de-intensification of chemotherapy have greatly improved outcomes, according to Hagop Kantarjian, MD, who has been very involved in much of the research in ALL treatment. Dr. Kantarjian, Professor and...
Research published by Zhang et al in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute showed that an inherited variation in the GATA3 gene strongly influences early response to chemotherapy and is linked to relapse in children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Minimal residual disease (MRD)...
For some patients with prostate cancer, surgery and/or radiation are considered standard treatments. However, these procedures may cause side effects, including urinary incontinence or impotency. A recent study published by Abreu et al in the Journal of Urology demonstrated that high-intensity...
A research letter published by Thornblade et al in JAMA Network Open examined the impact of race or ethnicity on rates of chemotherapy, liver resection, and survival among patients with metastatic colorectal cancer. “The unfortunate reality is that minorities, especially Black people, have a much...
As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine by Wolf et al, the phase II GEOMETRY mono-1 trial has shown durable responses with the selective MET inhibitor capmatinib in patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and MET exon 14–skipping mutations. The trial supported the May...
As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine by Reinhard Dummer, MD, and colleagues, 5-year follow-up of the phase III COMBI-AD trial has shown continued relapse-free survival benefit with adjuvant dabrafenib/trametinib vs placebo in patients with stage III melanoma and BRAF V600E or V600K...
This week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, released new data from the 2020 National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS). The results, published by Wang et al in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), show 1.8 million...
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many stem cell transplant centers (including guidance from the National Marrow Donor Program [NMDP]) recommend that stem cell products be frozen for preservation. However, findings from a study by Duncan Purtill, MD, and colleagues in Blood Advances suggest that the...
As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Nowak et al, the Australian phase II DREAM trial showed activity with the triplet of durvalumab plus cisplatin/pemetrexed in previously untreated patients with advanced malignant mesothelioma. Study Details In the multicenter trial, 54 evaluable patients with...
In the TRANSCEND NHL 001 study reported in The Lancet, Jeremy S. Abramson, MD, and colleagues found that the autologous CD19-directed chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell agent lisocabtagene maraleucel (liso-cel) produced a high response rate in patients with relapsed or refractory large B-cell...