In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers demonstrated a benefit in overall survival among patients with epithelial ovarian cancer receiving generic beta-blocker heart medications. Survival was shown to be greatest among those prescribed first-generation nonselective beta-blockers. According to...
A study from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center researchers—the first to examine the effects of combined radiation and chemotherapy on the healthy brain tissue of glioblastoma patients—revealed not only specific structural changes within patients’ brains, but also...
Medulloblastoma, the most commonly occurring malignant brain tumor in children, can be classified into four subgroups, each with a different risk profile requiring subgroup-specific therapy. Currently, subgroup determination is done after surgical removal of the tumor. Investigators at...
Combing data collected on thousands of California patients with ovarian cancer, University of California Davis researchers have determined that almost one-third of patients survived at least 10 years after diagnosis. The findings upend the notion that women diagnosed with cancer of the ovaries...
Scientists have known for years that a mutation in the BRAF gene makes moles start to grow but until now have not understood why they sometimes do not become cancerous. Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have identified a major genetic factor that...
A large-scale genetic study of the links between telomere length and risk for five common cancers found that long telomeres are associated with an increased risk of lung adenocarcinoma. No significant associations between telomere length and other cancer types or subtypes were observed. The study,...
Cancer can be caused solely by protein imbalance within cells, a study of ovarian cancer has found. Until now, genetic aberrations have been seen as the main cause of almost all cancer. The research, published by Timsah et al in Oncogene, demonstrates that protein imbalance is a powerful prognostic ...
Lower levels of ERCC1 (excision repair cross-complementation group 1) and thymidylate synthase expression may be predictive of longer survival in patients with metastatic colon cancer, according to a study by Choueiri et al in PLOS One. It was shown that patients with low levels of ERCC1 and...
After decades of overtreatment for low-risk prostate cancer and inadequate management of its more aggressive forms, patients are now more likely to receive medical care matched to level of risk, according to a study by researchers at the University of California, San...
In their bid to find the best combination of therapies to treat anaplastic thyroid cancer, researchers at Mayo Clinic's Florida campus demonstrated that all histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors are not created equal. In testing multiple HDAC inhibitors in combination with the chemotherapy drug...
Physicians have long sought a way to accurately predict cancer patients’ survival outcomes by looking at biologic details of the specific cancers they have. Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have compiled a database that integrates gene expression patterns of ...
A “pill on a string” developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge could help doctors detect esophageal cancer at an early stage, helping them overcome the problem of wide variation between biopsies, suggests research published by Ross-Innes et al in Nature Genetics. The...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Orphan Drug designation to Novogen Limited’s chemotherapy candidate drug Anisina for neuroblastoma. Anisina is a small molecule belonging to a family of compounds called anti-tropomyosins. It has been designed to inhibit Tpm3.1, a...
Despite findings of previous studies and published guidelines, nearly two-thirds of patients with T4a laryngeal cancer are not receiving a total laryngectomy—the recommended form of treatment—and, as a result, have significantly worse survival rates vs those treated with a total...
A review of medical records for almost 200 patients with breast cancer suggests that more selective use of biomarker testing for such patients has the potential to save millions of dollars in health-care spending without compromising care, according to Johns Hopkins researchers. Specifically,...
Researchers have a significantly better understanding of the genetic alterations found in cutaneous melanoma as part of a multi-institution, international effort of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). The study, published in Cell, refined and revealed new molecular subgroups of patients who could...
The phase IIIb CONSIGN trial has confirmed the benefit of regorafenib (Stivarga) in patients with previously treated metastatic colorectal cancer, researchers announced July 3 at the European Society for Medical Oncology World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer in Barcelona, Spain (Abstract...
The SENRI trial has opened the window to evaluate neurokinin 1 (NK1) antagonists for emesis prevention in patients taking oxaliplatin chemotherapy, said European Society for Medical Oncology World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer (ESMO) spokesperson and antiemetics expert Fausto Roila, MD....
While the use of antiangiogenesis drugs that block the growth of new blood vessels can improve the treatment of some cancers, clinical trials of their ability to prevent the development of new metastases have failed. Now a study from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center may have...
Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have discovered that inhibiting the immune receptor protein TLR4 may not be a wise treatment strategy in all cancers, as research now shows TLR4 can either promote or inhibit breast cancer cell growth depending on mutations in...
The results of a nearly 10-year investigation that identified a key gene mutation that can trigger acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and several other types of cancer were recently published by Noetzli et al in Nature Genetics. The findings have, for the first time, pinpointed a mutation that...
Women who were exposed to higher levels of the pesticide DDT in utero were nearly four times more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer as adults than women who were exposed to lower levels before birth, according to a study published by Cohn et al in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & ...
Houston Methodist Neurological Institute neurosurgeon David Baskin, MD, presented preliminary data from a phase II clinical trial that suggests gene therapy (AdV-Tk therapy), which uses a mediated herpes simplex virus, combined with a traditional treatment—surgical resection—could ...
Patients older than age 45 with thyroid cancer that has spread to neck lymph nodes have long been considered at higher risk of dying, but the same has not been true for younger patients. Now researchers at the Duke Cancer Institute and the Duke Clinical Research Institute have found that...
A study by Dahlstrom et al investigating the usefulness of serum antibodies to human papillomavirus (HPV)-16 DNA antigens as predictors of survival for patients with oropharyngeal carcinoma has found that E1, NE2, and E6 antibody positivity were all strongly associated with improved overall and...
A modified poliovirus therapy that is showing activity in patients with glioblastoma works best at a low dosage, according to the research team at Duke’s Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center. The dosage findings for the first 20 patients in the phase 1 trial were presented June 1 at the...
In the largest study of its kind, transplant physicians at Mayo Clinic in Florida have found that liver cancer patients have similar beneficial outcomes whether using organs donated by patients after cardiac death or brain death. The study was recently published by Croome et al in the American...
More than half of all cancer patients experience pain, most often associated with the malignancy type, body location, and disease progression. Pain researchers participating in a symposium at the American Pain Society Annual Scientific Meeting last month reported that the relationship between...
New cases of virtually all types of cancer are rising in countries globally—regardless of income—but the death rates from cancer are falling in many countries, according to a new analysis of 28 cancer groups in 188 countries. These findings were published by Fitzmaurice et al in JAMA...
A phase III trial comparing 5 years of tamoxifen vs 5 years of the aromatase inhibitor anastrozole for postmenopausal women treated for ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) found 10-year breast cancer–free interval rates were higher in the anastrozole group than in the tamoxifen group (93.5% vs...
As the practice of genetically profiling patient tumors for clinical treatment decision-making becomes more commonplace, a recent study from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center suggests that profiling normal DNA also provides an important opportunity to identify inherited mutations...
A federally funded phase III trial found that adding whole-brain radiation therapy to radiosurgery did not significantly extend survival of patients with one to three small metastases of the brain, although it did help to control the growth of brain metastases, as evidenced by imaging studies....
A randomized phase III study resolves long-standing questions about the optimal timing of neck lymph node surgery for patients with early-stage oral cancer by showing that elective neck dissection both improves survival and lowers recurrence rates compared to therapeutic neck dissection performed...
Survivors of childhood cancer in recent eras have shown a significant reduction in late mortality, and “for the first time, we have been able to attribute that to fewer deaths from treatment-related causes or fewer deaths from late effects of the primary therapy,” Gregory T....
First results from a randomized phase III study show that the combination of ibrutinib (Imbruvica) and bendamustine (Treanda)/rituximab (Rituxan) improves outcomes for patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) that progressed despite prior therapy. At a median follow-up of 17 months,...
A new study finds that women who are diagnosed with breast cancer and have a family history of the disease face no worse a prognosis after treatment than other women with breast cancer. The study, which was published by Eccles et al in the British Journal of Surgery, offers a positive message for...
One-view digital breast tomosynthesis detects 40% more breast cancers than two-view digital mammography does, according to a major screening study from Lund University in Sweden. The study’s results were published by Lång et al in European Radiology. This is the first large-scale study ...
Two phase III Children’s Oncology Group studies found that augmenting therapy with additional drugs improved outcomes for children with a high-risk form of Wilms tumor. These patients have a specific chromosomal abnormality associated with a poorer prognosis. In prior research, such patients...
A large, phase III international study of the oral agent TAS-102 in patients with heavily pretreated metastatic colorectal cancer has found that the therapy improved overall survival by 1.8 months and also delayed disease progression. TAS-102 had few side effects and was also effective in patients...
For women with a family history of breast cancer, new multigene panel testing yields greater information about cancer risk while assessing deleterious BRCA1/2 mutations as accurately as BRCA testing alone, according to a study presented at the American Society of Breast Surgeons Annual Meeting....
A clinical trial of the EGFR inhibitor AZD9291 in patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who had disease progression after previous treatment with EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors has found that the drug was highly active—achieving a 95% disease control rate—in...
No approved targeted therapies exist to treat triple-negative breast cancer, but new chemotherapeutic treatment strategies are helping shrink tumors so that less breast tissue needs to be removed during surgery. New research led by Brigham and Women's Hospital finds that breast-conserving therapy...
In a study reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Ohri et al found that higher pretreatment metabolic tumor volume on 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) was associated with poorer overall survival and an increased risk of locoregional failure in...
A combination of two molecularly targeted drugs, olaparib (Lynparza) and the investigational agent AZD5363, was safe and yielded responses in patients with a variety of cancer types, including breast, ovarian, and prostate cancers, regardless of BRCA1/2-mutation status, according to data from the...
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) has issued its updated draft recommendation statement on mammography screening guidelines. The revised guidelines still recommend that women aged 50 to 74 get mammography screening for breast cancer every 2 years and now states that the decision to...
A disincentive for hospitals that have invested in expensive technology for robotic surgery may be jeopardizing prostate cancer patients who seek out the procedure, concluded a study published by Sammon et al in BJU International. The study compared complication rates in hospitals with low...
The immunotherapy pembrolizumab (Keytruda) was found to be safe and yielded durable responses in patients with advanced, non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Those with high levels of the protein PD-L1 in their tumors had better clinical outcomes, according to phase I KEYNOTE-001 clinical...
In the first randomized trial to compare two U.S. Food and Drug Administration–approved immune checkpoint inhibitors as first-line therapy for patients with advanced melanoma, pembrolizumab (Keytruda) yielded significantly better treatment outcomes than ipilimumab (Yervoy) for all endpoints...
In a statement, the American Society of Clinical Oncology praised the U.S. Senate’s 92-to-8 approval of legislation to repeal the Sustainable Growth Rate formula. ASCO President Peter Paul Yu, MD, FACP, FASCO, said, “Today's courageous vote by the U.S. Senate to finally end the...
In an analysis reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Scher et al found that circulating tumor cell count and LDH level served as an individual-level surrogate for survival among patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer receiving abiraterone acetate (Zytiga) plus...