MK-4830—a novel, first-in-class human IgG4 monoclonal antibody targeting the myeloid-specific anti–immunoglobulin-like transcript 4 (ILT4) receptor—administered either as a single agent or in combination with pembrolizumab was well tolerated and showed activity in heavily pretreated patients with...
Upon hospital admission for cancer, many patients already demonstrated a high prevalence of malnutrition per Global Leadership Initiative on Malnutrition (GLIM) criteria, which was associated with the risk of developing a nosocomial infection, according to findings presented by Nuñez Abad et al at...
Pralsetinib (also known as BLU-667) showed activity in patients with advanced RET mutation–positive medullary thyroid cancer, including high rates of durable response, disease control, and 18-month progression-free survival. These findings were presented by Hu et al at the ESMO Virtual Congress...
In a quality-of-life analysis from the phase IV CARD trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Karim Fizazi, MD, and colleagues found that cabazitaxel was associated with improved pain response, time to pain progression, and time to symptomatic skeletal events vs abiraterone or enzalutamide in...
In a Danish Breast Cancer Group phase III trial (DBCG HYPO) reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Offersen et al found no difference in the rates of breast induration with moderately hypofractionated vs standard fractionated radiotherapy in women with early breast cancer or ductal carcinoma ...
Before Judith Kaur, MD, the self-proclaimed “Mother of the YIA” became Conquer Cancer®, the ASCO Foundation’s first grant recipient more than 35 years ago, she was a wife, a teacher, and then a stay-at-home mom. Going to medical school and becoming a research pioneer was just a daydream. “When I...
Incidence rates for pancreatic cancer were 6-fold to 10-fold higher among participants in a study who had recent-onset diabetes and weight loss.1 This led the study authors to write: “The coexistence of these symptoms should be recognized by clinicians given that both the relative and absolute...
A large cohort study with close to 160,000 men and women reported that “recent-onset diabetes accompanied by weight loss was associated with a substantial increase in risk for pancreatic cancer and may represent a high-risk group in the general population for whom early detection strategies would...
MorphoSys and Incyte have announced that tafasitamab-cxix, a humanized Fc-modified cytolytic CD19-targeting monoclonal antibody, has been included in the latest National Comprehensive Cancer Network Clinical Practice Guidelines® (NCCN Guidelines®) in Oncology for B-Cell Lymphomas. Specifically,...
In the phase III VIALE-A trial reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Courtney D. DiNardo, MD, MSCE, of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and colleagues found that venetoclax plus azacitidine significantly improved overall survival vs azacitidine alone in previously...
As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Stephen W. Duffy, MSc, of the Centre for Cancer Prevention, Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Queen Mary University of London, and colleagues, final results of the UK Age Trial show that initiation of annual mammography screening for breast cancer at...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Jean-Jacques Grob, MD, PhD, of Aix-Marseille University, France, and colleagues, the first interim analysis of the phase II KEYNOTE-629 trial has shown the achievement of durable responses with pembrolizumab treatment of recurrent or metastatic...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Daniel O. Persky, MD, of the University of Arizona Cancer Center, Tucson, and colleagues, the phase II Intergroup National Clinical Trials Network Study S1001 has shown good outcomes with positron-emission tomography (PET)-directed therapy in...
“Older adults form the majority of patients with cancer.” For more than 3 decades now, almost every article, presentation, or discussion related to cancer and aging started with this statement. As I entered the field of geriatric oncology, I thought that by simply stating this fact, everyone would...
Neratinib is an oral pan-HER tyrosine kinase inhibitor that is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for two indications. The first is as adjuvant treatment of early-stage HER2-positive breast cancer following adjuvant trastuzumab therapy. The second is in combination with...
The first half of 2016 was arguably the most exciting of my life. My wife, Jaione, and I had decided to leave the United Kingdom and move with our two children, Andrew, then 14, and Alba, then 10, to Denver, where I was taking on a leadership role in corporate affairs for a brewery company. By the...
She was elderly, slightly confused, and very, very worried. I was not quite sure why. It was a minor procedure—a routine angiogram, one of a dozen to be performed that morning. The risks were so small that the job of admitting her had been handed to me, then a final-year medical student, with a...
Born in Brooklyn on April 4, 1919, Ezra M. Greenspan, MD, did not stray far from his birthplace, spending most of his 5-decade medical career in New York. After graduating from New York University School of Medicine in 1942, he was accepted into the house training program at Mount Sinai Hospital...
As a young girl growing up in central New Jersey, Joyce F. Liu, MD, MPH, a medical oncologist specializing in gynecologic cancers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, dreamed of becoming an astronaut. However, she realized her fear of heights and propensity for motion sickness didn’t jive with...
A researcher at the Indiana University (IU) Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center has been awarded a 5-year, $5.7 million National Cancer Institute (NCI) grant to evaluate long-term health outcomes for patients with cancer who receive platinum-based chemotherapies. An internationally...
On July 24, 2020, brexucabtagene autoleucel, a CD19-directed genetically modified autologous T-cell immunotherapy, was granted accelerated approval for the treatment of adult patients with relapsed or refractory mantle cell lymphoma.1,2 Brexucabtagene autoleucel is approved with a Risk Evaluation...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
George J. Chang, MD, MS, FACS, FASCRS, of the Department of Surgical Oncology at The University of MD Anderson Cancer Center, told The ASCO Post that although adjuvant therapy in stage II disease has been shown to improve outcomes in patients with certain high-risk features, “the benefits are...
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...
In the Clinic provides overviews of novel oncology agents, addressing indications, mechanisms of action, administration recommendations, safety profiles, and other essential information needed for the appropriate clinical use of these drugs. On September 1, 2020, azacitidine tabletswere approved...
Liquid biopsies using circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) have the potential to personalize medicine for patients with lymphoma, going beyond traditional markers and risk factors to provide dynamic assessments over time. Expanded applications of ctDNA liquid biopsy beyond diagnosis include early response ...
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...
Findings from two meta-analyses designed to summarize quality-of-life data on patients receiving immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy for cancer were presented at the ESMO Virtual Congress 2020 (Abstract 1568O). These meta-analyses found that patients receiving immune checkpoint inhibitors had...
Among patients with stage III colon cancer, patients aged 70 or older were less tolerant of adjuvant oxaliplatin/flouropyrimidine therapy, in addition to having poorer relapse-free interval rates on the regimen, according to findings from a large subgroup analysis of the phase III TOSCA trial...
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 an exploratory analysis of the phase IIIb/IV CheckMate 153 trial published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, David M. Waterhouse, MD, MPH, and colleagues found that continuing nivolumab beyond 1 year of treatment vs stopping at 1 year of treatment was associated with better outcomes in...
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...
Long-term findings from the phase III CheckMate 238 study showed that nivolumab improved 4-year recurrence-free survival compared with ipilimumab in patients with resected stage IIIB to C or IV melanoma in the overall population as well as across subgroups of patients stratified by disease stage...
No significant difference was observed in the risk of recurrence, local recurrence, or death between patients with cervical cancer in whom a radical uterine procedure (mostly radical hysterectomy) was completed or abandoned upon intraoperative detection of positive pelvic lymph nodes. These...
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 single-institution retrospective analysis reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Weinstein et al identified the prevalent cancer detection rate associated with supplemental abbreviated breast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) screening among average-risk women with dense breasts who had...
A prospective biomarker analysis of the multicohort phase II KEYNOTE-158 trial reported by Marabelle et al in The Lancet Oncology found that patients with previously treated advanced solid tumors were more likely to respond to pembrolizumab monotherapy if they had high tissue tumor mutational...
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...
Almost half of patients who received the PARP inhibitor olaparib for newly diagnosed BRCA-mutated advanced ovarian cancer remained disease-free after 5 years, according to data presented by Susana Banerjee, MBBS, PhD, and colleagues during the ESMO Virtual Congress 2020 (Abstract 811MO). Patients...
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 large group of patients with metastatic colorectal cancer, consumption of a few cups of coffee a day was associated with longer survival and reduced risk of disease progression, according to findings reported by Mackintosh et al in JAMA Oncology. The findings, based on data from a large...