Do patients with breast cancer and a low 21-gene recurrence score need regional node irradiation to reduce their risk of locoregional recurrence? An analysis of RxPONDER trial data suggests only a randomized clinical trial devoted to this question can provide a decisive answer. An analysis of data...
A 3-week course of radiation therapy is as safe and effective as 4 to 6 weeks of treatment for patients with early-stage breast cancer who have a higher risk of having their tumors recur, results of a randomized phase III clinical trial show. Delivering fewer, but higher, doses of radiation...
A new study has found that sexual side effects of cancer treatment are discussed far less frequently with female patients than with male patients, even when the treatment directly affects sex organs. Among patients receiving brachytherapy for prostate or cervical cancer at a high-volume cancer...
Meeting with a medical physicist who can explain how radiation therapy is planned and delivered may reduce patient anxiety and increase patient satisfaction throughout the treatment process, according to a new study published by Burmeister et al in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology •...
Nicholas J. Vogelzang, MD, FACP, FASCO, an expert in the treatment of patients with renal cell carcinoma, died on September 20, 2022. Dr. Vogelzang was 72 years old. Son of a Preacher Dr. Vogelzang was born on December 13, 1949, in Holland, Michigan, the oldest of seven children, in a close-knit...
It is estimated that one in eight men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in his lifetime. The disease is so prevalent, and other than skin cancer, it is the most common cancer diagnosed in American men. According to the American Cancer Society, this year, about 268,490 new cases of prostate...
“Hats off to the investigators for the first comparison of triplet to doublet in advanced renal cell carcinoma. This is also the first results using a contemporary control group. The study met its primary endpoint,” said Sumanta K. Pal, MD, FASCO, Co-Director of the Kidney Cancer Program, City of...
In this installment of the Living a Full Life series, Guest Editor Jame Abraham, MD, FACP, spoke with William L. Dahut, MD, who is currently serving as Chief Scientific Officer for the American Cancer Society (ACS). In this role, Dr. Dahut manages all pieces of the organization’s discovery work,...
Richter transformation, usually a diffuse large B-cell lymphoma developing in a person with CLL, remains a challenging entity, but novel regimens look promising, as described at the 2022 Pan Pacific Lymphoma Conference by Matthew S. Davids, MD, MMSc, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard...
To put the CheckMate 914, IMmotion010, and PROSPER trials into context, The ASCO Post spoke with Bernard Escudier, MD, former Chair of the Genitourinary Group of the Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France. In general, Dr. Escudier believes that studies to date are not robust enough to justify...
Three negative phase III trials presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2022 may dampen enthusiasm for immunotherapy as adjuvant therapy for renal cell carcinoma (RCC). None of the three trials—CheckMate 914, IMmotion010, and PROSPER—met its primary endpoint.1-3 The...
FLASH radiation treatment—which delivers therapeutic doses of radiation in a fraction of a second—may be a potential treatment for tough-to-kill tumors, a first-in-human study in a small number of people with bone cancer suggests. The technology, previously tested in animals, was shown to be as...
Adding stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) to systemic therapy with sorafenib for patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) may extend overall survival and delay tumor progression without compromising patients’ quality of life, findings from the randomized phase III NRG...
An artificial intelligence (AI) model developed by researchers may assist in predicting the likelihood that a patient may have an unplanned hospitalization during radiation treatments for cancer. The machine-learning model uses daily step counts as a proxy to monitor patients’ health as they go...
New research confirmed the safety of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines in individuals with cancer who are undergoing immunotherapy, according to a novel study published by Widman et al in JNCCN–Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. The researchers analyzed the frequency of immune-related...
Female patients with cancer were less satisfied with the quality of their cancer care than male patients with cancer, according to the results of a survey conducted by the Survivor Views program of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network (ACS CAN). In addition, female patients were more...
David Cescon, MD, PhD, Clinician Scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto, Canada, was the invited discussant of the two MONALEESA analyses.1,2 He noted that the most recent overall survival analysis, presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2021,...
For advanced breast cancer that is hormone receptor–positive and HER2-negative, sacituzumab govitecan-hziy significantly reduced the risk of disease progression by 34% over physician’s choice of treatment, based on the results of the phase III TROPiCS-02 trial.1 The heavily pretreated patients in...
The past year has seen an unprecedented number of practice-changing advances across all three major breast cancer subtypes. For patients with early-stage triple-negative breast cancer, neoadjuvant chemotherapy plus pembrolizumab firmly entered the standard of care based on improvements in...
The final overall survival analysis of the phase III PALOMA-2 trial has shown no significant benefit for palbociclib given with letrozole, vs letrozole and placebo, as a first-line treatment in hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer.1 The results were reported at the 2022 ...
Invited discussant Patricia LoRusso, DO, PhD, of Yale School of Medicine, said to the assembled audience at the 2022 ASCO Annual Meeting: “I see you are as excited about these data as I am,” after the applause ended following Dr. Modi’s presentation. “I want to thank our colleagues for helping to...
The ASCO Post asked Debu Tripathy, MD, Professor and Chair of Medical Breast Oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, and Hope S. Rugo, MD, FASCO, Professor of Medicine, Director of Breast Oncology and Clinical Trials Education at the University of California San...
Angela DeMichele, MD, MSCE, the Alan and Jill Miller Professor in Breast Cancer Excellence at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, commented on NIMBUS1 for The ASCO Post. She said obtaining information on tumor mutational burden is simple, as it is part ...
The invited discussant of monarchE,1 Aditya Bardia, MD, MPH, Director, Breast Cancer Research, and Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, commented: “Based on a hazard ratio of 0.69 for invasive disease–free survival, the results are statistically significant and clinically...
As more patients with cancer have their tumors genomically profiled and more therapies targeting genomic alterations enter clinical trials, the task of connecting patients with trials for which they are eligible can be especially challenging. The novel computer platform MatchMiner, developed by the ...
In the past year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved four treatment options for patients with breast cancer, which are summarized herein. T-DXd for HER2-Low Breast Cancer On August 5, 2022, the FDA approved fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki (Enhertu; T-DXd) for adult patients with...
Invited discussant James Larkin, PhD, a clinical researcher at the Royal Marsden Hospital, London, commented on the findings from NICHE-2.1 “These striking data are consistent with the recent report in locally advanced mismatch repair–deficient [dMMR] rectal cancer from Memorial Sloan Kettering.2...
Treatment with neoadjuvant immunotherapy in colon cancer resulted in major pathologic responses in 95% of patients, NICHE-2 investigators reported at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2022.1 Additionally, after 4 weeks of nivolumab plus ipilimumab, 67% of patients with...
The cost of cancer treatment may negatively impact the physical and mental health of survivors who are living in poverty, according to a recent study published by Coughlin et al in the Journal of Oncology Practice. The findings provide important information about the impact social determinants may...
ASCO and the African Organisation for Research and Training in Cancer (AORTIC) have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) committing the two organizations to collaborate to advance cancer research in Africa. Harnessing the respective programs, leaders, and member networks of both...
Formal discussant of the KEYNOTE-189 and KEYNOTE-407 trials, Mary O’Brien, MD, Head of the Lung Unit, Royal Marsden Hospital, NHS Foundation Trust, London, found that both studies showed consistent gains in overall and progression-free survival with pembrolizumab/chemotherapy, but she expressed...
The results of SWOG S18011 were met with enthusiasm by attendees at the Presidential Symposium of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2022. The ASCO Post captured the thoughts of several melanoma experts, who had somewhat different ideas about the immediate clinical...
After my first breast cancer diagnosis, in 2010, the odds for a cure were seemingly all weighted in my favor. A routine mammogram screening had picked up a small—less than 1 cm—mass in my right breast, and a tissue biopsy confirmed it was stage I estrogen receptor–positive breast cancer. I had no...
With the aging of the world population, geriatric oncology is becoming a mainstay. Over the past year in The ASCO Post, we published a couple of articles on the history of oncology, including one on the history of geriatric oncology in the United States and Europe. Our goal was to promote a...
In the more than 7 months since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, cancer care for Ukrainian citizens has changed dramatically. Ukraine was once a country able to provide its approximately 160,000 newly diagnosed patients with cancer each year with modern diagnostic methods, including...
The addition of cabozantinib to nivolumab plus ipilimumab prolonged progression-free survival in untreated intermediate-risk patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma (RCC), according to the first results of the phase III COSMIC-313 trial. These findings were presented as a Presidential Symposium ...
Discussant of the IMpower010 abstract, Benjamin Besse, MD, PhD, Professor and Head of Clinical Research at Institute Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France, said there is enough evidence to use adjuvant immunotherapy in stage II–IIIA resected non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), calling the increased...
State-run Medicaid insurance, expanded in 2014 as part of the Affordable Care Act, has resulted in decreased metastatic cancer incidence rates as well as decreased overall cancer mortality rates, and has averted over 1,000 deaths due to cancer per year. About 12% of the improvements in cancer...
The incorporation of blood-based measurements—ie, “liquid biopsies”—into imaging assessment may refine the accuracy of prognosis in aggressive lymphomas, as described by David Kurtz, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Division of Oncology, Stanford University Medical Center, in a talk at the 2022...
From microchips to automobiles, people in the United States are experiencing shortages of all kinds of products, and oncology treatments are no exception. In particular, shortages related to chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy have been reported, most acutely, for B-cell maturation...
Discussant of the IMpower010 abstract, Benjamin Besse, MD, PhD, Professor and Head of Clinical Research at Institute Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France, said there is enough evidence to use adjuvant immunotherapy in stage II–IIIA resected non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), calling the increased...
On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization (Dobbs)1 and overturned Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey, which recognized a federal constitutional right to end a pregnancy up to the point of viability. This decision opened the door for states to...
September 24 is World Cancer Research Day, an initiative organized by a collaboration of professional societies, research organizations, and other institutions. In advance of the event, the following declaration was published in order to outline the goals of the initiative: Cancer is projected to...
New computed tomography (CT) technology paired with artificial intelligence (AI)-based noise reduction may offer superior detection of bone disease associated with multiple myeloma at lower radiation doses than conventional CT, according to a recent study published by Baffour et al in Radiology....
A physician-scientist at City of Hope has identified a novel combination immunotherapy regimen—a triplet therapy consisting of regorafenib, ipilimumab, and nivolumab—that demonstrated significant response in patients with chemotherapy-resistant, microsatellite-stable metastatic colorectal cancer....
In an international, multicenter phase II clinical trial, 63.3% of patients with stage II to IV cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma saw their tumors nearly or completely eradicated when treated with the anti–PD-1 agent cemiplimab-rwlc before surgery. The results were presented by Gross et al at the...
Updated results from KRYSTAL-1, a multicohort phase I/II study, evaluating adagrasib—an investigational, highly selective, and potent oral small-molecule inhibitor of KRAS G12C—with or without cetuximab in patients with advanced colorectal cancer harboring a KRAS G12C mutation were presented by...
A novel treatment strategy with personalized cell therapy significantly improved progression-free survival compared to standard immunotherapy in patients with advanced melanoma, according to results from the phase III M14TIL trial reported by John Haanen, MD, PhD, and colleagues at the European...
“I think the biggest innovations of the 21st century will be at the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning!” —Steve Jobs Relapsed and refractory multiple myeloma remains a treatment challenge. Promising responses have been demonstrated with bispecific antibodies, with a...
The numbers are dizzying. The costs of cancer care in the United States are rising so fast that by 2030, it is projected the national cancer-attributable costs will total more than $246 billion, up from $183 billion in 2015—a 34% increase.1 And although the total global economic burden of cancer is ...