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...
The ASCO Community Research Forum (CRF) is a solution-oriented venue for community research sites to overcome barriers to conducting clinical trials. Each year, the CRF council, comprising ASCO member volunteers, selects topic areas and specific solution-oriented projects for working groups to make ...
Registration is now open for the Community Research Forum (CRF) Annual Meeting, which will take place on September 20 to 21, at ASCO Headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. Join fellow physician investigators and research staff from all types of community-based research sites and programs to discuss...
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...
Christa Braun-Inglis, MS, NP, has seen her last three practices certified through ASCO’s Quality Oncology Practice Initiative (QOPI®). Ms. Braun-Inglis, a nurse practitioner with Kaiser Hawaii Region, was not solely responsible for the designations, although she helped some of the practices become...
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...
ASCO has responded to changing health-care standards by submitting comments to the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) on the revised version of its proposed General Chapter 800, “Hazardous Drugs—Handling in Healthcare Settings.” While ASCO notes some positive changes to the proposal, the Society...
The following new appointments were recently announced at Cleveland Clinic’s Taussig Cancer Institute. James Stevenson, MD Dr. Stevenson has been appointed Vice Chairman of the Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology. As Vice Chairman, Dr. Stevenson will assist the Chairman and Department...
Kevin Fitzpatrick has been named CEO of CancerLinQ LLC, a wholly owned nonprofit subsidiary of ASCO. Mr. Fitzpatrick, who is currently the Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer of the American College of Cardiology (ACC), will begin his new role on August 3. CancerLinQ LLC was...
Charles M. Rubin, MD, Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Chicago Medicine, a highly respected specialist in the care of children with cancer, died on July 17. He was 62. An authority on all aspects of pediatric cancers, Dr. Rubin had a particular interest in brain tumors and...
Stephen S. Grubbs, MD, a community oncologist and managing partner at Medical Oncology Hematology Consultants, PA, in Newark, Delaware, has been named the Senior Director of ASCO’s new Clinical Affairs department. Dr. Grubbs is a longtime ASCO member and volunteer and the Principal Investigator of...
Registration is open for the Community Research Forum (CRF) 2015 Annual Meeting, which will be held September 20–21, at ASCO Headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. Join fellow physician investigators and research staff from all types of community-based research sites and programs to discuss barriers ...
The following essay by Karen J. Krag, MD, is adapted from The Big Casino: America’s Best Cancer Doctors Share Their Most Powerful Stories, which was coedited by Stan Winokur, MD, and Vincent Coppola and published in May 2014. The book is available on Amazon.com and thebigcasino.org. It is easier ...
The value proposition in health care is often represented with the following equation: Value = Outcomes/Cost. The simplicity of this equation, however, belies the complexity of its parts, which are the contributions of multiple stakeholders with unique perspectives. A session presented at the 2015...
Oscar Wilde famously defined a cynic as “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” I do not think that oncologists need to be as cynical as this, but it was very appropriate that a major theme of this year’s ASCO Annual Meeting was the concept of “value.” It is clear that...
Among the Conquer Cancer Foundation’s newest supporters, Ludwig Cancer Research is an international community of distinguished scientists dedicated to preventing and controlling cancer. Its emphasis on collaboration and long-term support has fostered its role as a leader in immunotherapy and other...
The ASCO Guidelines Program has worked with other professional societies and guideline development organizations in an effort to expand the ASCO guideline portfolio and harmonize recommended care options across prominent guideline development groups. For ASCO, this effort began with a systematic...
Suicidal thoughts and impulses are among the most challenging symptoms in patients with cancer, and they may occur both during and after treatment. It has long been known that a cancer diagnosis carries an increased risk for suicide, but the problem is not widely addressed. Suicide is one of the...
The International Psycho-Oncology Society (IPOS) has partnered with the American Psychosocial Oncology Society (APOS) for the 17th World Congress of Psycho-Oncology, held in late July 2015 in Washington, DC. Its theme, “From National to Global: Implementing the Standard of Psychosocial Care in...
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) recently awarded Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) at the University of Utah and The UNM Cancer Center (UNMCC) at the University of New Mexico Comprehensive Cancer Center status. An NCI-Designated Comprehensive Cancer Center must demonstrate depth and breadth of...
St. Barnabas Hospital is located in the heart of Bronx, New York, and as such, it has a culturally diverse, largely poor, patient population. The backbone of successful palliative care services is the doctor-patient communication bonding process. However, many of the patients with late-stage cancer ...
Rural cancer patients have long had to adjust to difficult geographic and financial barriers to access high-quality cancer care. These problems are exacerbated by today’s fiscal challenges, which have disrupted many of the small community practices that once served rural communities. In 2006, the...
The statistics are staggering. Despite the development of novel analgesics and the increasing awareness of the importance of adequately controlling pain from cancer or its treatment, up to 50% of patients undergoing treatment and between 70% and 90% of patients with advanced disease experience some ...
ASCO has called on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to reconsider revisions to payment policies that could be administratively burdensome to oncology practices and result in reimbursement that inadequately supports optimal cancer patient care. In a comment letter to CMS on...
According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), about 70,000 adolescents and young adults—defined by the NCI as those in the 15- to 39-year-old range—are diagnosed with cancer each year in the United States, about six times the number of cases diagnosed in children aged 0 to 14.1 And, although...
ASCO’s Community Research Forum (CRF) held its 2015 Annual Meeting September 20–21 at ASCO Headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. Over 75 physician investigators, program directors, and research staff attended the meeting, representing a wide range of community-based practices and research sites...
Researchers have determined just how many lives are lost when effective investigational drugs are not approved in a timely manner. These delays in the process of anticancer drug approvals result in thousands of premature deaths each year, according to an analysis presented at the 16th World...
Children with in utero exposure to chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy during maternal treatment for cancer had no impairment in cognition, cardiac function, and general early childhood development, according to a study reported at the European Cancer Congress in Vienna, Austria, and published...
Frederic Amant, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor, Staff Gynecologic Oncologist, and Head of the Scientific Section of Gynecologic Oncology at University Hospitals Leuven in Leuven, Belgium, stressed that the study by Lambertini et al is a meta-analysis, not a randomized controlled trial. Nevertheless,...
S. Gail Eckhardt, MD, FASCO, is a tenured Professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, where she also holds the Stapp Harlow Chair in Cancer Research. She has been a faculty member at the institution since 1999 and was Division Head of Medical Oncology from 2006–2014. Currently, she...
Treatment decision-making for oncologists and their patients may become simpler through the use of graphic NCCN Evidence Blocks™, which were unveiled at the NCCN 10th Annual Congress: Hematologic Malignancies™ sponsored by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN¨). The first of the NCCN...
Sandra L. Wong, MD, MS, the William W. Coon Professor of Surgical Oncology and Associate Chair of Clinical Affairs at the University of Michigan Health System, has been named Chair of Surgery at Dartmouth-Hitchcock and the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and Senior Vice President of the...
ASCO University®, ASCO’s eLearning center, offers an array of courses and programs relevant to palliative care and multidisciplinary team–based cancer care. Below are descriptions of just a few of these offerings. Pain Management Released in March 2015, ASCO University’s “Pain Management Program”...
City of Hope in Duarte, California, recently announced the following new appointments. Susanne G. Warner, MD Dr. Warner has been appointed Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Surgery. She received her medical degree from Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine, where...
The Mayo Clinic Board of Trustees named Bobbie Gostout, MD, Vice President of the Mayo Clinic. Dr. Gostout will be the physician leader for Mayo’s community practice in the Midwest, including Mayo Clinic Health System in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, and Mayo Clinic’s Minnesota-based community...
The ASCO Post is pleased to reproduce installments of the “Art of Oncology” as published previously in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO). These articles focus on the experience of suffering from cancer or of caring for people diagnosed with cancer, and they include narratives, topical essays,...
The Los Angeles County Medical Association (LACMA) awarded the Hospital Physician Leadership Award to Alexandra M. Levine, MD, MACP, Chief Medical Officer of City of Hope. Dr. Levine received the award in recognition of her exemplary contributions to the medical profession, including her leadership ...
In a continuation of a 2014 conference that explored regulatory considerations and strategies for next-generation sequencing, the Friends of Cancer Research, with support from Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc, Pasadena, California, met to discuss the issues and problems of coordinating drug and ...
In 1990, when Bruce (B.J.) Miller, MD, was an undergraduate at Princeton University, the practice of medicine was far from his mind. Then a student in Chinese and Asian studies and later an art history major, Dr. Miller would come to pursue a career specializing in palliative medicine after an...
Low- and middle-income countries bear a larger share of the global cancer burden than does the developed world,” said Greta Massetti, PhD, Associate Director for Science, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Division of Cancer Prevention and Control and Co-Chair of the National Cancer...
Mohamed Bentires-Alj, PharmD, PhD, was recognized with the 8th Annual American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Outstanding Investigator Award for Breast Cancer Research, funded by Susan G. Komen. He received the award at the 2015 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. The AACR Outstanding...
The ASCO Post is pleased to reproduce installments of the “Art of Oncology” as published previously in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO). These articles focus on the experience of suffering from cancer or of caring for people diagnosed with cancer, and they include narratives, topical essays,...
John Andrew “Drew” Ridge, MD, PhD, FACS, Chief of Head and Neck Surgery and Louis Della Penna Family Chair in Head and Neck Oncology at Fox Chase Cancer Center–Temple Health, has been elected President of the Medical Staff at the Center. In his new role, Dr. Ridge will work with President and CEO...
The Association of American Cancer Institutes (AACI) is developing a marketing campaign to highlight the value of academic cancer centers to their communities and the nation. Called “The Academic Difference,” the 2-year campaign is the initiative of AACI President George J. Weiner, MD, Director of...
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital has opened the St. Jude Red Frog Events Proton Therapy Center, the first proton therapy center in the world dedicated solely to children with cancer. Patients are now being treated at the center using precisely delivered, high-energy protons to kill or shrink...
City of Hope recently announced the following new staff additions. Bart O. Roep, PhD Internationally recognized immunologist Bart O. Roep, PhD, has joined City of Hope as Chair of the Department of Diabetes Immunology within the Diabetes & Metabolism Research Institute. An expert in the...
A new guidance statement from ASCO and the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine (AAHPM) could potentially lead to more standardized primary palliative care delivery across oncology settings, according to Kathleen E. Bickel, MD, MPhil, who presented the study findings at the 2015...
The American Society of Hematology (ASH) has released a list of five hematology-related tests and procedures to question based on recommendations from other medical societies taking part in the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) Foundation’s Choosing Wisely® campaign. This list...
Women with a certain type of lung nodule visible on lung cancer screening computed topography (CT) exams face a higher risk of lung cancer than men with similar nodules, according to a new study (SSA04-02) presented by Boiselle et al November 29 at the Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of...
Backed by a growing body of research, investigators at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute are calling for all hospitals to establish bereavement programs for families of deceased patients. In a report published by Morris and Block in the Journal of Palliative Medicine, researchers say such...