While packing a punch in terms of clinical benefit, everolimus plus exemestane can also be a tough pill to swallow for many patients. The management of the potential toxicities associated with this new regimen was addressed at the 2012 Breast Cancer Symposium by Matthew J. Ellis, MB, PhD, of...
For the treatment of endocrine-sensitive metastatic breast cancer, the combination of an mTOR inhibitor and an endocrine agent represents a promising new option. At the 2012 Breast Cancer Symposium, the 18-month update of BOLERO-2, which tested therapy with everolimus (Afinitor) plus exemestane,...
Drug development is a highly competitive business. A new drug must be proven to be better than the standard one before it can be registered for public use. Starting with preclinical data, there should be evidence of lower 50% inhibitory concentrations in selective cell lines or a broader spectrum...
Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is mainly a disease of the elderly, and the lack of a standard regimen for elderly patients has been a major challenge. The myelosuppressive regimens used to treat younger patients are not well tolerated by the elderly. However, some newer approaches currently...
The FDA has approved paclitaxel protein-bound particles for injectable suspension, albumin-bound (nab-paclitaxel, Abraxane) for use in combination with carboplatin for the initial treatment of patients with locally advanced or metastatic non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who are not candidates for ...
Community oncologists man the front line of cancer care, treating upward of 85% of our nation’s patients. Over the past 2 decades, regulatory and economic changes have left many practices in a state of flux and uncertainty, some struggling to keep their doors open. To shed light on the community...
I’ve been part of the uro-oncology community for more than 30 years and have been proud to be involved in a good number of well-powered, enthusiastically subscribed randomized clinical trials. These have dated back to a time before randomization was necessarily the fashion. I have had the pleasure...
Although the effects of BRAF inhibition were initially unprecedented in patients with BRAF-mutated metastatic melanoma, “the problem is that the effect is not durable,” said formal discussant of this trial, Reinhard Dummer, MD, University Hospital of Zurich, Switzerland. The development of...
For the majority of patients with nephroblastoma and pulmonary metastases, pulmonary radiotherapy can be omitted and the patients will still have a relatively good outcome, according to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. “The rationale of omitting pulmonary [radiotherapy] for...
Real smokers sharing in graphic terms what it is like to live with disfiguring or disabling tobacco-related diseases were the featured spokespersons for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) national media campaign to encourage smokers to quit. Based on short-term response, the CDC...
A novel mechlorethamine, 0.02%, gel produced comparable or higher response rates (depending on the measurement used) than did mechlorethamine, 0.02%, compounded ointment, in a randomized controlled, multicenter study among 260 patients with stage IA to IIA mycosis fungoides, the most common form of ...
The rise in obesity in the United States coincides with greater recognition of the role of obesity in cancer and other diseases.1 While decades of research have indicated a strong association between obesity and cancer, “several forces have made that association increasingly recognized,” according...
The Conquer Cancer Foundation of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) recently announced the first-ever recipients of its Quality Care Symposium Merit Awards. This year’s recipients will be recognized at ASCO’s inaugural Quality Care Symposium, taking place November 30 and December 1 in ...
Scientific Name: Angelica sinensis Common Names: Chinese angelica, dang gui, tang kuei, tan kue Overview Dong quai is a perennial herb indigenous to China, Japan, and Korea. Its root has been used for centuries as a spice, tonic, and medicine. Dong quai is mentioned in Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing, the...
One reason that adoptive cell transfer has met with limited clinical success is that approaches based on this strategy have not fully taken into account the role of the tumor microenvironment as a limiting factor in immunotherapy. Recently reported studies by Peng and colleagues1 from The...
Third- or fourth-line therapy with sorafenib (Nexavar) failed to extend overall survival in patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), according to the main results of the phase III MISSION trial. However, a post hoc biomarker analysis of MISSION suggested that patients with...
In the Clinic provides overviews of novel oncology agents, addressing indications, mechanisms, administration recommendations, safety profiles, and other essential information needed for the appropriate clinical use of these drugs. Indication In November 2011, ruxolitinib (Jakafi) was approved for...
The number of patients with multiple primary cancers is increasing so that second malignant neoplasms now represent approximately 16%, or 1 in 6 cancers reported to the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program. While some second malignant neoplasms are treatment-related, others...
Many experts agree that at 18% of gross domestic product, health care (to paraphrase Shakespeare) is eating the country out of house and home. “The average cost of treating the most common cancers has increased, and as more expensive targeted therapies and other new technologies become the...
The FDA has expanded labeling to include the results of an additional trial evaluating the safety and efficacy of pemetrexed (Alimta) for the initial treatment of patients with locally advanced or metastatic, nonsquamous, non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) followed by pemetrexed maintenance in...
Trials with pazopanib (Votrient) have “provided significant efficacy, toxicity, and tolerability data for pazopanib to be established as a first-line standard of care” for renal cell carcinoma,” Tim Eisen, PhD, of the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, stated at the 11th International Kidney...
In the Clinic provides overviews of novel oncology agents, addressing indications, mechanisms, administration recommendations, safety profiles, and other essential information needed for the appropriate clinical use of these drugs. Indication On October 11, 2012, paclitaxel protein-bound particles...
Breast cancer mortality has been found to be higher among black and Hispanic women than among white women, with the differences in outcome being attributed in part to more advanced disease stage and greater frequency of unfavorable tumor biology among black and Hispanic women. Studies to date have...
The theme of this year’s International Conference of the Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO) was “Honoring Diversity in Cancer Prevention and Control.” The conference was held October 8–10, 2012, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and examined such varied topics as health-care disparities, novel...
Donald I. Abrams, MD, Chief of Hematology-Oncology at San Francisco General Hospital and Integrative Oncologist at the University of California, San Francisco, Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, has been investigating and incorporating integrative medicine approaches in his clinical treatment...
In the Clinic provides overviews of novel oncology agents, addressing indications, mechanisms, administration recommendations, safety profiles, and other essential information needed for the appropriate clinical use of these drugs. Indication On September 27, 2012, regorafenib (Stivarga) was...
InSightec Ltd announced that the FDA has approved ExAblate MRI-guided focused ultrasound as a therapy to treat pain from bone metastases in patients who do not respond or cannot undergo radiation treatment for their pain. This is the second FDA approval for ExAblate since it was approved in 2004 as ...
Overdiagnosis and the harms associated with unnecessary procedures is becoming a vibrant subject in today’s health-care dialogue, with serious implications for providers and patients alike. A new study from the Norwegian Screening Program concluded that 15% to 25% of breast cancers identified on...
At the Pan Pacific Lymphoma Conference, held this year in Maui, Hawaii, Andreas Engert, MD, Chairman of the German Hodgkin Study Group, University Hospital of Cologne, Germany, led off the Hodgkin lymphoma section of the conference with a presentation on optimizing the use of BEACOPP (bleomycin,...
Widespread use of screening technologies has markedly increased early detection rates of cancer, saving countless lives. However, while screening technologies have remarkable sensitivity, their inability to identify which tumors will progress and which will not has created the phenomenon of...
In chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), continued long-term therapy that prevents both progression to accelerated-phase disease and the emergence of resistance may be thought of as an “operational” or “functional” cure. However, long-term disease control without the requirement for continuous treatment...
As John Goldman, DM, FRCP, FRCPath, FMedSci, discussed earlier, a substantial minority of patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) experience treatment failure. Jorge Cortes, MD, of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, introduced this session with two patient cases to illustrate...
Cytogenetic analysis remains an important component of patient monitoring until a complete cytogenetic response is achieved. In addition, the ability of conventional cytogenetics to identify additional chromosomal abnormalities not detected by fluorescence in situ hybridization is noteworthy. Jorge ...
The importance of achieving a certain level of response with imatinib (Gleevec) by 3 months in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) had previously been established in the IRIS (International Randomized Study of Interferon and STI571) trial.1 Analysis of data from this trial showed that...
John Ridgway Durant, MD, ASCO’s 20th President, was born on July 29th, 1930, and died on October 28th, 2012. Dates that mark a person’s birth and passing are made all the more significant by how that person filled the days that link the two milestones. Dr. Durant will be remembered fondly as a man...
Patients with hepatitis B virus (HBV)-related hepatocellular carcinoma who received nucleoside analogs after curative liver resection had an associated lower risk of hepatocellular carcinoma in a nationwide cohort study using data from the Taiwan National Health Research Data Base. The study was...
A randomized controlled trial among patients with newly diagnosed localized Ewing sarcoma found that “chemotherapy administered every 2 weeks is more effective than chemotherapy administered every 3 weeks, with no increase in toxicity,” investigators from the Children’s Oncology Group reported in...
In a comparison of surgical treatment strategies for low-grade gliomas, patients in Norway treated at a hospital that generally favored early surgical resection had better overall survival than patients treated at a hospital that favored diagnostic biopsy and watchful waiting, according to a study...
“At Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, we recently made a decision that should have been a no-brainer: we are not going to give a phenomenally expensive new cancer drug to our patients.” That was the opening sentence of a New York Times op-ed piece written by three physicians from Memorial...
Although internationally recognized today as the founder of the subspeciality of psycho-oncology, the field of psychiatry held no interest for Jimmie C. Holland, MD, when she entered Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, in the mid-1940s. Born in 1928 at the dawn of the Great Depression,...
While few patients receive radiation for cancer treatment in the last 30 days of life, almost 1 in 5 patients who do spend more than 10 of those days in treatment and more than half spend more than 5 days, according to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.1 The investigators used...
A therapeutic modality of traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture has been extensively investigated in Western medical settings. Its clinical use is increasingly common for the management of pain and other conditions. In the oncology setting, research demonstrates that acupuncture can...
I am frequently asked about the “true” history of prostate-specific antigen (PSA). As PSA has become more important, a controversy about its discovery has increased. I lived through much of this history and have known many of the “players.” Here are the relevant facts, as I believe them to be ...
Distinguished physician, scientist, mentor, and leader Waun Ki Hong, MD, recently accepted the American Cancer Society 2012 Medal of Honor Award in recognition of his novel, high-impact clinical research that has extended the frontiers of cancer treatment and prevention. Dr. Hong is Vice Provost...
The positive healing effects of music can be traced as far back as ancient Greece and the belief that Apollo was God of medicine and music. In his book De Anima, Aristotle wrote that flute music could purify the soul. By the end of the 19th century, researchers were showing a correlation between...
“The data speak for themselves,” stated Robert Jones, MD, of the Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Center, Glasgow, UK, during discussion of the MAINSAIL trial at the 2012 ESMO Congress. The study raises some important questions, he continued: What are the implications for designing future trials?...
Invited discussant of the abstract, George Demetri, MD, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, Boston, noted that metastatic soft-tissue sarcomas present with variable clinical behaviors but are nearly always incurable with any approach. “Therefore, our intent is to palliate...
The addition of aggressively dosed ifosfamide to doxorubicin in the treatment of advanced soft-tissue sarcomas significantly delayed disease progression but did not improve survival in the randomized phase III EORTC 62012 trial conducted by the Soft Tissue and Bone Sarcoma Group of the European...
Novel Multikinase Inhibitor Improves Survival in Metastatic Colorectal CancerBy Caroline HelwickThe novel tyrosine kinase inhibitor regorafenib, given as a single agent to patients with treatment-refractory metastatic colorectal cancer, significantly improved overall survival and delayed disease...
Multikinase inhibitors (sorafenib [Nexavar], sunitinib [Sutent], pazopanib [Votrient], axitinib [Inlyta], regorafenib [Stivarga]) block various proteins including vascular endothelial growth factor receptor (VEGFR) and platelet-derived growth factor receptor (PDGFR). They have been approved by...