The American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) has issued a new guideline, “The Role of Postoperative Radiation Therapy for Endometrial Cancer: An ASTRO Evidence-Based Guideline,” that details the use of adjuvant radiation therapy in the treatment of endometrial cancer. The...
In a phase IIa trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Miller et al assessed combined HER2-targeted therapy with the antibody-drug conjugate ado-trastuzumab emtansine (Kadcyla) and pertuzumab (Perjeta) in women with HER2-positive locally advanced or metastatic breast cancer. Pertuzumab...
In female patients undergoing breast cancer lumpectomies, intraoperative frozen section margin assessment has been shown to decrease overall reoperation rates, according to the results of a study reported by Boughey et al in the journal Surgery. This finding may lead to lower health-care costs, a...
Bevacizumab has exhibited limited activity in advanced melanoma. In an interim analysis of the open-label phase III AVAST-M trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Corrie et al found that adjuvant bevacizumab (Avastin) in patients with resected melanoma at high risk of recurrence has thus far...
As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Tombal et al, a single-arm phase II trial of the androgen receptor inhibitor enzalutamide (Xtandi) has shown that the agent is active in suppressing disease and well tolerated in men with hormone-naive prostate cancer. In this ongoing trial, 67 men with...
In a study of health-care organization data reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Corley et al assessed the relationship between proportion of colonoscopies performed by a gastroenterologist that detect an adenoma and risk of subsequent interval colorectal cancer and colorectal cancer...
An analysis of prostate tissue biopsies collected from participants in the placebo arm of the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial (PCPT) has found that those whose benign prostate tissue had chronic inflammation had 1.78 times higher odds of having prostate cancer, and 2.24 times higher odds of having ...
In the open-label noninferiority phase III ASPECCT trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Price et al found that anti-EGFR monoclonal antibody treatment with panitumumab (Vectibix) produced a noninferior overall survival outcome vs cetuximab (Erbitux) in patients with chemotherapy-refractory...
A recent study published in Cancer found that, contrary to treatment guidelines for high-risk bladder cancer, neoadjuvant chemotherapy is not commonly used in routine clinical practice. Utilization of adjuvant chemotherapy was found to be increasing over time and was associated with a substantial...
A majority of cancer patients experience some level of fatigue during their course of treatment, and approximately 30% contend with persistent fatigue for years after treatment. Fatigue is among the most common and distressing long-term effects of cancer treatment and significantly affects patient...
ASCO has adapted the Pan-Canadian Practice Guideline on Screening, Assessment, and Care of Psychosocial Distress (Depression, Anxiety) in Adults With Cancer for use in the screening, assessment, and care of anxiety and depressive symptoms in adults with cancer. The adapted guideline, reported in...
The American Society of Clinical Oncology has released a clinical practice guideline on prevention and treatment of chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy in adult cancer patients, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The overall incidence of chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy ...
The activity of four transcription factors appears to distinguish the small proportion of glioblastoma cells responsible for the aggressiveness and treatment resistance of the deadly brain tumor. The findings by Suvà et al, published online in Cell, support the importance of epigenetics in...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Buchholz et al, ASCO has endorsed the recently published Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) and American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) consensus guideline on margins for breast-conserving surgery with whole-breast irradiation in stage I...
Patients with cancer of the throat and who are positive for the human papillomavirus (HPV) have a good prognosis, but until now the effect of being HPV-positive on the prognosis of tumors located elsewhere in the head and neck was unknown. A new study presented at the 33rd Conference of the...
The recently reported open-label phase III AURELIA trial showed that the addition of bevacizumab (Avastin) to chemotherapy resulted in significant improvements in progression-free survival, the primary study endpoint, and objective response rate in women with recurrent platinum-resistant ovarian...
Obesity, rather than diet, causes changes in the colon that may lead to colorectal cancer, according to a study in mice by the National Institutes of Health. The finding bolsters the recommendation that calorie control and frequent exercise are not only key to a healthy lifestyle, but a strategy to ...
Non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) harboring ALK rearrangement is sensitive to the ALK inhibitor crizotinib (Xalkori), but resistance ultimately occurs. In a phase I study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Shaw et al found that the more-potent ALK inhibitor ceritinib was...
Patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) in the chronic phase who are resistant or intolerant to imatinib (Gleevec) can experience long-term benefit with dasatinib (Sprycel), according to results of a randomized phase III study. The CA180-034 study also found that early molecular and...
The ACOSOG Z9001 (Alliance) study showed that 1 year of adjuvant imatinib (Gleevec) prolonged recurrence-free survival after resection of primary gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST). As reported by Corless et al in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, a study evaluating correlation of pathologic...
In a UK phase II study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Hillmen et al assessed the safety and activity of adding rituximab (Rituxan) to chlorambucil (Leukeran) in first-line treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). Such a regimen may be an alternative to fludarabine-based...
Adjuvant radiation following surgery for soft-tissue sarcoma of the extremities did not lead to a survival benefit and seemed to be associated with some degree of long-term limb complications, according to a presentation at the 2014 Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) Cancer Symposium in Phoenix...
In a study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Imperiale et al found that a noninvasive, multitarget stool DNA test—including assays for KRAS mutations, aberrant NDRG4 and BMP3 methylation, β-actin, and hemoglobin—was significantly more sensitive but significantly less ...
Extending national breast cancer screening programs to women over the age of 70 does not result in a decrease in the number of cancers detected at advanced stages, according to new research from The Netherlands. Instead, researchers told attendees at the 9th European Breast Cancer Conference that...
Researchers at UC Davis have found that the investigational cancer vaccine tecemotide, when administered with the chemotherapeutic agent cisplatin, boosted immune response and reduced the number of tumors in mice with lung cancer. The study also found that radiation treatments did not...
Participating in athletic activities for more than an hour a day reduces the risk of breast cancer, and this applies to women of any age and any weight, regardless of geographic location, according to research presented at the 9th European Breast Cancer Conference in Glasgow. Compared with the...
Women whose breast cancer has spread to just a few lymph nodes under their arm are less likely to have their disease recur or to die from it if they have radiotherapy after mastectomy, according to new research presented today at the European Breast Cancer Conference in Glasgow and published in The ...
A large retrospective cohort study by Potosky et al of 15,170 men with early-stage prostate cancer has found that patients who received androgen deprivation as their primary treatment instead of surgery or radiation did not live any longer than those who received no curative-intent treatment. Men...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Goldkorn et al assessed the prognostic value of circulating tumor cell counts in patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer receiving standard first-line docetaxel plus prednisone with or without atrasentan in the SWOG S0421 trial. ...
In the open-label, phase III EORTC 62012 trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Judson et al found that doxorubicin plus ifosfamide was not associated with any overall survival advantage compared with doxorubicin alone in patients with advanced or metastatic soft-tissue sarcoma. Progression-free...
In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Rosmarin et al assessed the association of reported fluorouracil (5-FU) toxicity genetic markers with occurrence of capecitabine toxicity of grade ≥ 3 in the QUASAR2 trial in colorectal cancer and with occurrence of capecitabine and 5-FU...
In an open-label phase III trial reported by Ardeshna et al in The Lancet Oncology, rituximab (Rituxan) induction plus maintenance was found to delay the need for subsequent therapy and improve elements of quality of life vs watchful waiting in patients with advanced asymptomatic nonbulky...
The first-ever comprehensive assessment of challenges facing the U.S. cancer care system suggests that patient access to cancer care will be threatened as growing demand for care outstrips the supply of oncologists, and as cost pressures force the closure of small physician practices that form the...
As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine by Bill-Axelson et al, additional long-term follow-up in the Scandinavian Prostate Cancer Group-4 trial (SPCG-4) continues to show significant benefits of radical prostatectomy vs watchful waiting in early prostate cancer, including reduced risk of ...
A simple questionnaire that rates breathing difficulties on a scale of 0 to 3 may be able to predict survival in patients with chronic graft-vs-host disease, according to a study by Palmer et al published in Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation. Although a poor National Institutes of Health ...
In a phase IIB study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Guarneri et al compared neoadjuvant letrozole plus lapatinib (Tykerb) or placebo in postmenopausal women with hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative breast cancer. Response rates were similar in the two groups, but a...
In a dose-escalation, cohort expansion study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Topalian et al found that treatment with the PD-1 immune checkpoint inhibitor nivolumab produced durable responses in patients with advanced melanoma. Long-term follow-up also showed promising survival rates...
A novel approach to cancer immunotherapy may provide a new and cost-effective strategy against ovarian cancer and mesothelioma. In a study published in the Journal of Hematology & Oncology, Yuan et al reported that a fusion protein engineered to combine a molecule targeting a tumor-cell-surface ...
A study by Ong et al has found that people who had nonmelanoma skin cancer were at an increased risk for subsequently developing melanoma and a spectrum of 29 other cancer types. The risk was especially high among people who develop nonmelanoma skin cancer before the age of 25. The findings are...
In an open-label phase III trial (MITO-7) reported in The Lancet Oncology, Pignata et al found that while a lower-dose weekly carboplatin/paclitaxel regimen did not improve progression-free survival compared with standard every-3-week carboplatin/paclitaxel as first-line treatment of advanced...
Immunotherapy for ovarian, breast, and colorectal cancer has so far had limited success, primarily because the immune system often can’t destroy the cancer cells. According to a report published in Oncotarget, researchers at Johns Hopkins have identified genes that have been repressed through ...
Research by Viprey et al has found that the detection of neuroblastoma mRNAs in peripheral blood and bone marrow aspirates from children diagnosed with stage IV neuroblastoma are independent predictors of event-free survival and overall survival. Their findings could help identify children with...
As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Larkin et al, interim results of a safety study designed to reflect the spectrum of patients encountered in routine practice suggest that vemurafenib (Zelboraf) has a safety profile in patients with BRAF V600–mutated metastatic melanoma similar to that...
Patients with the most common type of esophageal cancer are less likely to respond to chemotherapy when their tumors are high in a protein called leptin, according to a study by Bain et al published in the British Journal of Cancer. Study Details Researchers from the University of Aberdeen...
In a recent study published in Science Translational Medicine, Davila et al found that 88% of patients with relapsed or refractory B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) who were treated with genetically modified versions of their own immune cells achieved overall complete response. Most...
A multicenter study led by Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has found that high-dose supplementation with both the trace element selenium and vitamin E may increase the risk of high-grade prostate cancer. This risk is dependent upon a man’s selenium status prior to taking the...
The findings of a large international prospective study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Finch et al suggest for the first time that women with BRCA1 mutations should have prophylactic oophorectomy by age 35, as waiting until a later age appears to increase the risk of ovarian...
Pathologic complete response has been proposed as a surrogate endpoint for long-term clinical benefit in breast cancer. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) established the international Collaborative Trials in Neoadjuvant Breast Cancer working group to perform a pooled analysis of...
Pancreatic cystic lesions are frequently detected radiologic incidentalomas, a considerable proportion of which are pancreatic cancer precursors. In a study reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Jabbar et al found that proteomic mucin profiling of cyst fluid was more accurate...
In response to FDA's approval earlier this week of ibrutinib (Imbruvica) to treat patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) who had received at least one prior therapy, The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) issued the following statement: "After the FDA designated ibrutinib as a...