In the phase III GADOLIN trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Laurie H. Sehn, MD, Chair, British Columbia Cancer Agency Lymphoma Tumor Group, and Clinical Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and colleagues, found that adding the anti-CD20 antibody obinutuzumab...
For diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, does the dose of rituximab (Rituxan) matter? Are there patient characteristics that determine outcomes as well as the optimal dose? These questions were explored at the 2016 Pan Pacific Lymphoma Conference by Matthew A. Lunning, DO, Assistant Professor of...
“We are in an era of unprecedented scientific opportunities in cancer research,” said Margaret Foti, PhD, MD (hc), Executive Officer, American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), as she introduced the Congressional briefing, “Seizing Today’s Opportunities to Accelerate Cancer Research.” “Thanks ...
In a small phase Ib/II study, 100% of patients with newly diagnosed diffuse large B-cell lymphoma evaluated thus far responded to treatment with obinutuzumab (Gazyva), lenalidomide (Revlimid), and CHOP (cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, vincristine, prednisone), investigators from the University of...
In the treatment of classical Hodgkin lymphoma, antibodies targeting programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) are just the beginning, according to Stephen M. Ansell, MD, PhD, Professor of Medicine and Chair of the Lymphoma Group at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota.1 Speaking at the 2016 Pan...
ASCO has published an adaptation of the 2015 Cancer Care Ontario (CCO) clinical practice guideline on adjuvant chemotherapy for early-stage breast cancer.1 There were several areas of controversy that the guideline attempts to address. Should Anthracyclines Be Standard of Care? The guideline...
According to Susan M. O’Brien, MD, an expert in the treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), novel agents and new data on patient subsets have led to a new upfront treatment algorithm for this malignancy. Speaking at the 2016 Pan Pacific Lymphoma Conference in Koloa, Hawaii, Dr. O’Brien...
“Have you received your immune checkpoint inhibitor yet?” I suspect St. Peter may have started asking this question routinely at the Pearly Gates to Heaven. If St. Peter has not, I am sure most oncologists have. With extensive media coverage on the approval of nivolumab (Opdivo) and pembrolizumab...
Amir T. Fathi, MD, an oncologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Boston, commented on the INO-VATE ALL trial for The ASCO Post. “It has been a fairly exciting time for patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia...
Testing for the activity of two genes could help identify women who are at increased risk of dying from breast cancer, according to a new study of almost 2,000 patients. Women whose tumors had a specific pattern of activity in the F12 and STC2 genes were three times as likely to die within 10 years ...
The ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group has received federal approval to add a quality-of-life research study, COMmunication and Education in Tumor Profiling, or COMET (EAQ152), to the NCI-MATCH (EAY131) trial already underway. Using feedback surveys before and after a patient undergoes tumor gene...
Computers can be trained to be more accurate than pathologists in assessing slides of lung cancer tissues, according to a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The researchers found that a machine-learning approach to identifying critical disease-related features...
A large, nationwide study published by Lee et al in the journal JAMA Oncology found that patients who received transplants of cells collected from a donor's bone marrow had better self-reported psychological well-being, experienced fewer symptoms of graft-vs-host disease (GVHD), and were more...
A team of researchers from nine leading academic hospitals and research centers have published a paper in the journal Cancer that describes pulmonary outcomes among childhood cancer survivors. The study also evaluates the impact of complications such as asthma, chronic cough, emphysema, and...
A collaborative modeling study evaluating outcomes for various screening intervals for women over the age of 50 based on breast density and risk for breast cancer has found that average-risk women with low breast density undergoing triennial screening and higher-risk women with high breast density...
Leptomeningeal metastases, a serious complication in lung cancer patients, were found to be more prevalent in patients with non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutations. In a recent study of leptomeningeal metastases published by Li et al in...
Immune response measured in tumor biopsies during the course of early treatment predicts which melanoma patients will benefit from specific immune checkpoint blockade drugs, according to researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Chen et al reported their findings in...
Prostate cancer and lung cancer have been the number 1 and 2 cancers among men. Stomach cancer, the third leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, has been on a steady decline among Koreans and Japanese. Black men had the highest overall rates of cancer. Thyroid cancer has been on the rise, and...
Three leading national cancer organizations have issued a consensus guideline for physicians treating women who have ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) treated with breast-conserving surgery and whole breast irradiation. The new guideline has the potential to save many women from unnecessary...
A study at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health showed that obesity was more prevalent in patients with a history of cancer than in the general population, and survivors of colorectal and breast cancers were particularly affected. The study is among the first to compare rates of...
For patients with the most common type of noninvasive breast cancer, routine testing for estrogen and progesterone receptors in tissue taken at the first needle biopsy is both unnecessary and wasteful, according to results of a study led by Johns Hopkins pathologists. The results for people with...
A Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) research team has identified an additional mechanism for resistance to targeted treatment for BRAF-mutant melanoma. Their findings, published by Shen et al in Nature Medicine, report that inactivating mutations in two genes responsible for regulating key...
Although a majority of states are still missing important opportunities to pass and implement legislative solutions proven to prevent and fight cancer, there is progress being made to move the nation closer to ending cancer as we know it, according to a report recently released by the American...
Many breast tumors grow in response to female hormones, especially estrogen. Drugs that reduce estrogen levels in the body often are effective in reducing tumor size and preventing recurrence of the cancer. But some tumors become resistant to these therapies and continue to grow and spread. A new...
Robot-assisted laparoscopic prostatectomy and open radical retropubic prostatectomy yielded similar domain-specific quality-of-life or pathologic outcomes at 12 weeks in men with newly diagnosed, clinically localized prostate cancer, according to the results of a randomized phase III trial reported ...
Heron Therapeutics, Inc, announced on August 10, 2016, that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved granisetron (Sustol) extended-release injection. Granisetron is a serotonin-3 (5-HT3) receptor antagonist indicated in combination with other antiemetics in adults for the prevention ...
Men with testicular cancer who were uninsured or on Medicaid had a higher risk of death from what is normally a curable disease than insured patients, a new study found. The findings, published by Markt et al in Cancer, add to growing evidence that differences in health insurance status can affect...
Considered a visionary in cancer research, Alfred George Knudson, MD, PhD, was internationally recognized for his “two-hit theory” of cancer causation, which explained the relationship between hereditary and nonhereditary cancer types, predicting the existence of tumor suppressor genes. Dr. Knudson ...
As reported by Toni K. Choueiri, MD, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, et al in The Lancet Oncology, the final results of the phase III METEOR trial indicate significantly improved overall survival with cabozantinib (Cabometyx) vs everolimus (Afinitor) in patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma...
On July 16, 1975, at 26 years of age, after almost 6 months of observing a left epididymal mass slowly enlarge, with workup for epididymal tuberculosis, I finally underwent a left inguinal orchiectomy and resection of what proved to be a pure seminoma. A subsequent lymphangiogram was reported to...
BookmarkTitle: The Gene: An Intimate HistoryAuthor: Siddhartha Mukherjee, MDPublisher: ScribnerPublication date: May 2016Price: $32.00; hardcover, 608 pagesOn February 28, 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick entered The Eagle, a favorite watering hole for researchers working at the University of...
I was raised to be an engineer. I grew up in an industrial community, worked summer jobs in a U.S. Steel chemical plant, and was good at science and math. My career choice was straightforward: I went to an engineering university. My first semester freshman year included a mandatory introduction...
At the 2015 Palliative Care in Oncology Symposium in Boston, Vicki Jackson, MD, MPH, Chief in the Division of Palliative Care and Geriatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital, Co-Director of the Harvard Center for Palliative Care, and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School,...
On July 7, 2016, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the Roche cobas HPV Test as the first test for human papillomavirus (HPV) that can be used with cervical cells obtained for a Papanicolau (Pap) test and collected in SurePath Preservative Fluid. The FDA approves HPV tests to be...
Juno Therapeutics, Inc., announced on July 12, 2016, that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has removed the clinical hold on the phase II clinical trial of JCAR015 (known as the ROCKET trial; clinicaltrials.gov identifier NCT02535364) in adult patients with relapsed or refractory B-cell...
American cancer centers promoting their services dramatically increased their advertising spending from 2005 to 2014, with the bulk of the spending by for-profit organizations, according to the results of a study published by Vater et al in JAMA Internal Medicine.1 Small Percentage Responsible for...
The addition of the anti–CTLA-4 (cytotoxic T-lymphocyte–associated protein 4) checkpoint inhibitor ipilimumab (Yervoy) to etoposide/platinum did not improve overall survival in the first-line treatment of patients with extensive-stage small cell lung cancer (SCLC), according to a phase...
Study Title: A Pilot Study of a Protein-Sparing Modified Fast for Weight Loss in Obese Endometrial Cancer Survivors Study Type: Pilot/interventional/single-group assignment Study Sponsor and Collaborators: Case Comprehensive Cancer Center, National Cancer Institute Purpose: To study whether the...
Quyen D. Chu, MD, MBA, FACS, this year’s recipient of ASCO’s Humanitarian Award, lives by the axiom that “One person can make a positive difference in the lives of others.” Although the term has become cliché, the experiences in Dr. Chu’s life and oncology career prove just how profound and...
Active pharmacovigilance in detecting and assessing the safety signals related to drugs and devices, and disseminating those findings to relevant stakeholders, is an important component in delivering safe, high-quality care in the cancer setting. To reach a better understanding of this issue,...
Recent years have seen the publication of a considerable amount of scientific literature questioning the effectiveness of mammography screening in decreasing breast cancer mortality.1-4 This article explores how the Israeli experience has demonstrated the efficacy of organized national...
In a phase II study reported in The Lancet Oncology, Brose et al found that vemurafenib (Zelboraf) had antitumor activity in patients with BRAF V600E–positive recurrent or metastatic papillary thyroid cancer refractory to radioactive iodine. Study Details In the study, 26 patients without...
There was a time when transplantation across human leukocyte antigen (HLA) barriers was fraught with so much difficulty that many thought it was impossible and we should stop trying. However, most patients do not have an HLA-matched sibling donor, and death was therefore certain if they had a...
In 1995, Daniel F. Hayes, MD, FASCO, gathered with several other oncologists at a conference center in San Francisco to begin writing the first-ever ASCO guidelines on cancer treatment. He and his colleagues felt like pioneers scouting uncharted frontier. “I’ll never forget, that first hour or so, ...
Management of chemotherapy-induced vomiting has improved with the use of antiemetics, but chemotherapy-induced nausea remains a major clinical problem, according to Alex Molassiotis, RN, PhD, Professor and Head of the School of Nursing at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. And, he added, the...
Prophylactic use of dexamethasone mouthwash significantly minimized the incidence of all grades of stomatitis in postmenopausal women receiving everolimus (Afinitor, Zortress) and exemestane for the treatment of hormone receptor–positive metastatic breast cancer, according to data presented by...
Postoperative treatment intensification with chemoradiotherapy does not achieve better outcomes when compared with postoperative chemotherapy in patients with gastric cancer who have already undergone preoperative chemotherapy, according to phase III data presented by Marcel Verheij, MD, PhD, et...
African American women undergoing mastectomy for breast cancer are more likely than white women to undergo autologous breast reconstruction using their own tissue, rather than implant-based reconstruction, reported Sharma et al in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. “African American race...
In an analysis from the St. Jude Lifetime Cohort Study reported in The Lancet Oncology, Bhakta et al found a high cumulative burden of cardiovascular morbidity among pediatric, adolescent, and young adult survivors of Hodgkin lymphoma. Study Details The study involved data from 670 survivors of...
Research conducted at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, is moving the field of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy forward in the treatment of B-cell malignancies. At the 2016 Pan Pacific Lymphoma Conference in Koloa, Hawaii, David G. Maloney, MD, PhD, Professor of...