Patients’ preference for how they receive biopsy results “has shifted from face-to-face visit to discussion over the telephone because of a desire for rapid notification,” according to a survey of 301 patients recruited at three different melanoma clinics. Although 67.1% of the patients preferred...
My life as a cancer survivor and an oncologist has taught me the importance of living every day to the fullest. Sometimes we all need a little reminding to appreciate life to the fullest. When I think of my former patient, Marc, that is what comes to mind. When I was a senior in high school, I was...
The ability to interrogate cancer cells at the genomic, proteomic, immunologic, and metabolomic levels will transform oncology care from one that relies mainly on trial-and-error treatment strategies based on the anatomy of the tumor to one that is more precisely based on the tumor’s molecular...
The information contained in this Clinical Trials Resource Guide includes actively recruiting clinical studies for patients with oral cavity and oropharyngeal cancers. The trials are investigating combination therapies, treatment toxicity, specialized adjuvant therapies, and proton therapy. All of ...
In 2014, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York opened the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Center for Molecular Oncology with the sole purpose of expediting the translation of novel molecular discoveries into clinical innovations to turn the goal of precision oncology care into...
In a move that reverberated through much of the cancer research community, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) recently announced that it had removed all prostate-specific antigen (PSA) data from its current Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) data submission and associated...
Direct your patients to www.cancer.net/blog for podcasts with ASCO experts discussing the research that was presented at the 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting. This series of “Research Round Up” podcasts provides the latest information on treatment and care for people with cancer and will help your patients ...
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 ...
Jeremy Abramson, MD, Clinical Director of the Center for Lymphoma at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, is not convinced that ibrutinib (Ibruvica) combined with bendamustine (Treanda) and rituximab (Rituxan) should be the new standard of care for previously treated chronic lymphocytic...
Defining and ensuring the delivery of high-value oncology care has been one of ASCO’s major goals for more than a decade. In 2007, ASCO formed the Task Force on the Cost of Cancer Care, now called the Value in Cancer Care Task Force, to identify the drivers of the increasing costs of oncology care...
“Patients, their families, and oncologists recognize the administration of chemotherapy near death as aggressive and poor-quality care,” William F. Pirl, MD, MPH, and colleagues from Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, wrote in the Journal of Oncology Practice. “However, rates have been slowly...
I had been watching a lump in my left breast for signs of cancer for 10 years, from around the time I was 21. Screening tests had failed to find any tissue abnormality, and my doctor said I was too young to have cancer, so I wasn’t overly concerned. But when I noticed the lump getting bigger in...
Finding agreement on high-value cancer screening among organizations publishing screening guidelines, the American College of Physicians (ACP) issued advice listing the least-intensive screening strategies that all the organizations recommend—as well as strategies not recommended—for five common...
Clara D. Bloomfield, MD, FASCO, always sat in the front row at school. She grew up during a rigidly paternalist period in American society, and her early feminist leanings were brushed aside as grade-school adventures. The medical school lecture room of the 1960s was a male-dominated culture, and...
Six young scientists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Rockefeller University, and Weill Cornell Medical College have been named the inaugural winners of a new prize established to recognize postdoctoral investigators in the life sciences. The Tri-Institutional Breakout Awards for Junior...
Here are several real-life examples of the positive effects of the mind-body program, shared by Robin Hardbattle, MS, LAc, and the parents of children who benefited from it. Breathing Practices and Guided Imagery: Prior to learning breathing practices and guided meditation, Matt, a 12-year-old...
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...
From Wrigley Field to McCormick Place, Chicago residents and visitors felt the energy surrounding the launch of The Campaign to Conquer Cancer during the ASCO 2015 Annual Meeting. The Conquer Cancer Foundation of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (CCF) threw out the ceremonial first pitch...
ASCO’s educational symposia have historically provided attendees with a forum for learning and discussion, demonstrating ASCO’s commitment to promoting a network of global oncology expertise. The 2015 Breast Cancer Symposium, to be held in San Francisco, California, from Friday, September 25, to...
Johnson & Johnson named Bert Vogelstein, MD, of Johns Hopkins University, Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the winner of the 2015 Dr. Paul Janssen Award for Biomedical Research for his breakthroughs in oncology research, which have spanned more than 2 ...
The quality of mammography images has markedly improved over the past few decades. However, the quality of the interpretation of mammograms remains variable. That said, more than 38 million mammograms are performed annually in the United States. So said Diana Buist, PhD, Senior Scientific...
If new immunotherapy combinations were administered to the half a million Americans dying of cancer each year, the nation’s price tag for treating them—for just 1 year—could top $174 billion, according to projections by Leonard Saltz, MD, Chief of Gastrointestinal Oncology and Chair of the Pharmacy ...
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...
Biosimilars are biologic drugs that are similar to an already established “reference” or “innovator” biologic drug product and can be manufactured when an original biologic drug product’s patent expires. Reference to the innovator product is an integral component of approval for a biosimilar. The...
A prospective, multicenter, observational study involving 992 consecutive patients with one to four asymptomatic, sonographically or cytologically benign thyroid nodules found that “the majority of nodules exhibited no significant size change during 5 years of follow-up or actually decreased in...
Scientist and Nobel Laureate Irwin “Ernie” Rose, PhD, passed away June 2, 2015, after a long illness. He was 88. Dr. Rose shared the 2004 Nobel Prize for chemistry with Aaron Ciechanover, MD, DSc, and Avram Hershko, MD, PhD, of the Israel Institute of Technology for their pioneering work in...
Brian E. Henderson, MD, began his medical path as a researcher in virology, and as a young scientist, he ventured to Africa as part of a Centers for Disease Control team to study yellow fever. The better part of his esteemed medical career, however, was as one of the world’s most respected...
I've been fortunate to be strong and healthy for most of my life. In fact, there is no history of any serious illness in my family, which is why I was so unprepared to hear the words “You have breast cancer” 5 years ago. Not only was the diagnosis foreign to me, I had no idea what chemotherapy and...
Amid the encouraging studies reported at the 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting about advances in the treatment of melanoma was a troubling finding about the incidence of melanoma increasing. An analysis of data from nine Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) registries found that the incidence...
INSIDE THE BLACK BOX is an occasional column providing insight into the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and its policies and procedures. In this installment, FDA supervisory toxicologist Todd Palmby, PhD, and pharmacologist Eias Zahalka, PhD, MBA, discuss the approach taken in the Office of ...
The information contained in this Clinical Trials Resource Guide includes actively recruiting clinical studies for patients with melanoma. The trials are investigating immune response; vaccine therapy; ipilimumab in conjunction with numerous therapies; and chemotherapy regimens. All of the studies ...
Laura van’t Veer, PhD, Co-leader of the University of California San Francisco Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center (HDFCCC) Breast Oncology Program, and her team at the Netherlands Cancer Institute were awarded the European Inventor Award for the invention of a gene-based tissue test,...
Geriatrics for the Oncologist is guest edited by Stuart Lichtman, MD, FACP, FASCO, and developed in collaboration with the International Society of Geriatric Oncology (SIOG). Visit SIOG.org for more on geriatric oncology. The elderly population in the United States is growing, and by the year...
Some years after successful treatment of a childhood cancer, a 16-year-old survivor required surgery to replace both hip joints, which were damaged from therapy containing steroids. An x-ray of the teenager’s destroyed joints is a stark reminder of the serious health challenges faced by cancer...
Cyrus Ghajar, PhD, a metastatic breast cancer researcher at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, has received a $4.1 million Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program (BCRP) “Era of Hope” Scholar Award. The Department of Defense’s BCRP is the second biggest funder of breast cancer...
At the 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting, both ASCO and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) unveiled details of new precision medicine trials that will greatly expand the number of patients with cancer who are benefiting from targeted agents. The trials will match a patient’s tumor molecular profile with an ...
Keith T. Flaherty, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Director of the Termeer Center for Targeted Therapy, Boston, was interviewed by The ASCO Post for his thoughts on the findings from Atreya and colleagues. He believes the study’s outcomes are sufficient for...
Kenneth Yu, MD, MSc, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, called investigational PEGPH20 “a very promising tumor microenvironment-targeted approach” that appears to be well tolerated. “The results are preliminary but there appears to be a biomarker ...
ASCO’s endorsement of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) guidelines on the role of radiotherapy in locally advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is an important summary of the best evidence on the appropriate role and techniques for radiotherapy in this disease.1 These...
We’ve seen how dramatically patients’ lives can change when they are matched with the right treatment at the right time in their disease course. Although this is still an exception and not the rule, we believe collaborative research approaches will make this kind of precision medicine a reality for ...
In a breakthrough proposal announced on July 8, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) plans to reimburse physicians for end-of-life counseling, a move that the oncology community has long been lobbying for. Arriving just as the presidential election cycle begins to heat up, the CMS ...
On May 14, 2015, over 160 colleagues, family members, friends, and patients of James F. Holland, MD, FASCO, gathered in the Goldwurm Auditorium in the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York to honor Dr. Holland for the contributions he has made during his remarkable career in ...
An 80-year-old patient with metastatic prostate cancer asked me to discontinue his treatments, which were costing him more than $1,000 every 3 months. Although he had Medicare, he did not have secondary insurance. I told him that I would seek compassionate-care payment from the pharmaceutical...
Three years ago, a study of adolescents and young adults aged 16 to 28 with metastatic or recurrent cancer or HIV/AIDS compared the usefulness of two previously developed advance care planning guides—one prepared specifically for adolescents and young adults and one specifically for adults. The...
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...
When Emil J Freireich, MD, retires from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center on September 1, he will have spent 50 years at the institution and a total of 60 years in the pursuit of curing childhood leukemia as well as other cancers and in the educational development of young...
“Between animal and human medicine there is no dividing line—nor should there be. The object is different but the experience obtained constitutes the basis of all medicine.” — Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902) Everyone has seen photographs of people who look like their dogs: the young woman with long...
Direct your patients to www.cancer.net/blog to get important information on traveling with cancer, including getting medical clearance before they book their flight. This information includes questions to ask the doctor, how to get permission from the airline to fly, and information on packing...
Julie M. Vose, MD, MBA, FASCO, began her term as the 2015–2016 President of ASCO at the 2015 Annual Meeting on June 1, 2015. Dr. Vose, a leading expert in the treatment of patients with lymphoma, is the current Neumann M. and Mildred E. Harris Professorial Chair and Chief of the Oncology/Hematology ...
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 ...