An older trial designed to evaluate the benefits of adjuvant therapy following radical prostatectomy in patients with high-risk prostate cancer showed no difference in overall or disease-free survival between 2 years of androgen-deprivation therapy and 2 years of androgen-deprivation therapy plus...
A novel approach using intravesical gene therapy showed promising activity in a phase II trial that enrolled patients with bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG)-refractory or -relapsed nonmuscle invasive bladder cancer.1 The rate of high-grade relapse-free survival at 12 months was 35% in patients treated ...
Human papillomavirus (HPV) is the most common sexually transmitted infection worldwide. It affects 80% of individuals, with the initial infection usually occurring between the ages of 15 and 24. Persistent infection with oncogenic HPV genotypes, primarily 16 and 18, is the cause of virtually all...
In 1995, Matthew Zachary, an aspiring concert pianist and composer, was en route to graduate school to study film composition when he lost all fine-motor coordination in his left hand, was diagnosed with pediatric brain cancer (medulloblastoma), told he would never play again, and was given 6...
Endocrine therapy for breast cancer has evolved over the years. Initial endocrine therapies consisted of ablative procedures (oophorectomy, adrenalectomy, and hypophysectomy). With the availability of pharmaceutical estrogens, progestins, and androgens, ablative procedure utilization begin to...
Gwendolyn P. Quinn, PhD, of Moffitt Cancer Center, discusses the challenges that minority, LGBTQ, low-literacy, and underserved populations face in getting their voices heard and what it will take to change that.
Exercise and/or psychological therapy may work better than medications to reduce cancer-related fatigue and should be recommended first to patients, according to a Wilmot Cancer Institute-led study published by Mustian et al in JAMA Oncology. “If a [patient with cancer] is having trouble...
As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Borchmann et al, a phase III German Hodgkin Study Group trial in advanced Hodgkin lymphoma showed no progression-free survival benefit of adding rituximab (Rituxan) in patients with positive positron-emission tomography (PET) findings after two courses (PET-2)...
Genentech, the Breast International Group, the Breast European Adjuvant Study Team, and the Frontier Science Foundation have announced positive results from the phase III APHINITY study. The study met its primary endpoint and showed that adjuvant treatment with the...
Results from a new prospective clinical trial indicate that high–dose rate (HDR) brachytherapy administered in a single 19-Gy treatment may be a safe and effective alternative to longer courses of HDR treatment for men with localized prostate cancer. The study was reported by Krauss et al in...
In a study reported in JAMA Oncology, Basch et al found that use of patient-reported outcome questionnaires to report symptomatic adverse events was feasible in the setting of multicenter cancer treatment trials. Study Details In the study, 361 consecutive patients enrolled in 1 of 9 U.S....
Although adolescence is a highly susceptible time for mammary carcinogenesis, few prospective studies have examined the role of adolescent diet and breast cancer risk. Now, a study investigating the association of an adolescent and early adulthood dietary pattern that promotes chronic inflammation...
A new analysis of data from the U.S. Military Health System found that mood and adjustment disorders such as anxiety and depression were strong predictors of the annual number of outpatient visits, hospital admissions, and number of days in the hospital for patients with breast and prostate...
As an increasing number of patients look to the internet for cancer information, researchers from the University of Alabama found that the websites of many National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated cancer centers lack sufficient information to help patients with breast cancer understand all their...
An influx of new oral cancer drugs provides patients with a more convenient and less invasive way to take medication, but such treatments are often associated with adherence challenges and medical errors. New research shows that the addition of an in-house specialty pharmacy at a cancer center in...
In 1978, Charles A. “Mickey” LeMaistre, MD, was named President of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. During his 18-year tenure, MD Anderson became a world leader in outpatient care for cancer patients and the nation’s largest ambulatory treatment and surgery programs in cancers....
People with rare cancers now have the option of joining a national clinical trial testing leading-edge immunotherapies for a wide variety of tumor types. It’s the first federally funded immunotherapy trial devoted to rare cancers. Despite their name, rare cancers make up more than 20% of cancers...
Stephen K. Carter, MD, a renowned oncologist who held a variety of executive positions in the pharmaceutical industry and played a major role in the research and development of many widely used cancer and AIDS drugs, died on November 14, 2016, after a long battle against multiple systems atrophy....
My breast cancer diagnosis in 1993, at age 34, came at the happiest moment in my life. I had gotten married just 10 months earlier and was looking forward to the future and children. But instead of celebrating my first wedding anniversary with my husband over a romantic dinner, we were at a cancer ...
Translational research in pancreatic adenocarcinoma has been limited by the difficulty of obtaining sufficient quality and quantity tumor tissue from patients. A study by Pietrasz et al assessing the feasibility and prognostic value of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) in pancreatic adenocarcinoma has...
Columbia University Medical Center, NewYork-Presbyterian, and the Life Raft Group, a patient advocacy organization specializing in advanced gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST), announced that they have entered into a collaborative research project to investigate the efficacy of a novel system...
“The big thing that is going to become more and more of an issue, and that you are going to hear a lot more of this year, and in the next several years, is overdiagnosis,” Otis W. Brawley, MD, FACP, Chief Medical Officer of the American Cancer Society, told The ASCO Post in an interview following...
Many news reports about the latest cancer statistics released by the American Cancer Society (ACS) have focused on the 25% reduction in cancer mortality since 1991. Several reports quoted ACS Chief Medical Officer Otis W. Brawley, MD, FACP, who said in a statement1 announcing the publication of...
Scientific Name: Glycine max Common Names: Soybean, soya, tofu, miso, tempeh Overview An annual herb indigenous to East Asia, soy was domesticated more than 3,000 years ago for its pods and edible seeds. It is now the world’s most important legume crop and is grown in diverse climates. Foods...
Hormone receptor–positive breast cancer is the most common subtype of breast cancer, and while endocrine therapy has long been a mainstay of therapy for these patients, treatment resistance ultimately develops. Therefore, better therapeutic approaches are needed. There are some data to suggest...
As reported by The ASCO Post from the recent European Society for Medical Oncology Conference, first-line treatment with ribociclib, a selective inhibitor of cyclin-dependent kinases 4 and 6 (CDK4/6), resulted in significantly longer progression-free survival vs placebo in women with hormone...
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine used heart muscle cells made from stem cells to rank commonly used chemotherapy drugs based on their likelihood of causing lasting heart damage in patients. Tyrosine kinase inhibitors can be an effective treatment for many types of cancers, ...
A new global initiative that includes founding partner University of Pittsburgh Medical Center was launched on January 17, 2017, at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland. It signals a dramatic shift in the way international organizations help country and city leaders...
During the past 40 years, hundreds of randomized trials testing treatments for advanced hepatocellular carcinoma have been published.1 Conventional systemic chemotherapy and radiotherapy lack survival advantages for these patients.1,2 In 2007, a phase III trial demonstrated survival benefits for...
The AURA3 study—reported by Mok and colleagues and reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post—confirms the dramatic activity of osimertinib (Tagrisso) in patients with advanced epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR)-mutant non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and acquired resistance to prior EGFR...
The ASCO Post is pleased to present this special focus on the worldwide cancer burden. The aim of this special feature is to highlight the global cancer burden for various countries of the world. For the convenience of the reader, each issue will focus on one country from one of the six regions...
The optimal treatment strategy for low-grade glioma has yet to be established, and practice patterns vary in regard to the timing of treatment, as well as the chosen treatment modality. It was against this backdrop, at a time when the benefits of radiation and chemotherapy remained uncertain but ...
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine scientists and doctors are embarking on the first-ever clinical trial to determine whether a genetic test they pioneered could successfully spare patients with nonaggressive thyroid cancer from complete removal of their thyroid. Such thyroid-preserving...
“Estimates suggest that by the year 2020, there will be over 500,000 adult survivors of childhood cancer in the United States,” Daniel A. Mulrooney, MD, MS, of the Division of Cancer Survivorship, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, reported at the 10th Oncofertility Conference in...
Nearly 60% of colorectal cancer cases are diagnosed in patients ≥ 65 years, with a median age at diagnosis of 68 years,1 but this population makes up only 34% of clinical trial participants.2 In addition, the older adults enrolled on clinical trials are traditionally the most-fit older adults....
Patients are hearing about immunotherapy in the news, and many want to know more about this treatment option. Hand your patients the ASCO Answers Understanding Immunotherapy Fact Sheet. It provides an overview on this treatment type, information on the different types of immunotherapy and side...
There’s no getting around it: the practice of oncology can be inherently stressful. First, there’s the workload: compared to other medical specialists, oncologists see a larger number of patients and spend more time with them in face-to-face interactions. It’s not unusual for oncologists to work 60 ...
Earlier this year, ASCO submitted comments to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in response to a Request for Information on data-sharing and management (NOT-OD-17-015). In the comment letter, ASCO expressed support for the NIH’s efforts to develop a framework and strategies for data-sharing ...
A 5-year, $1.8 million grant from the National Cancer Institute awarded to Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey resident research member Wenwei Hu, PhD, will support research to further elucidate the mechanisms behind the most frequently mutated gene in human tumors—p53. The aim is to explore...
Jose Leis, MD, PhD, of the Mayo Clinic in Arizona, commented on the promise of checkpoint inhibitors in Richter transformation. “At Mayo, we have treated more than 30 patients with programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) blockade. We do see that chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) has low expression ...
The traditional three-phase clinical trial process for testing new drugs does not necessarily make sense when it comes to targeted therapies, according to many experts, including regulators, academic researchers, industry chief executive officers, and patient advocates alike. Instead of three...
Innovation in precision medicine has introduced an amalgam of testing options, of which hereditary cancer panels—multigene tests—are a major component. Additionally, the importance of inherited cancer genomics was further bolstered by former President Barack Obama’s Precision...
In a phase III trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Scott et al found that myeloablative conditioning for allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation was associated with a reduced risk of relapse and a nonsignificant overall survival advantage vs reduced-intensity conditioning in...
Patients with advanced malignant soft-tissue sarcoma of the extremities have typically faced amputation of the afflicted limb as the only treatment option. However, a technique that limits the application of chemotherapy to the cancerous region can preserve limbs in a high percentage of these...
Women with early-stage breast cancer who had an intermediate risk recurrence score from a 21-gene expression assay had similar outcomes, regardless of whether they received chemotherapy, a new study from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer finds. The research, published by Barcenas et al in ...
Researchers have found a link between microbes in the gut (the microbiome) and response to immunotherapy. In the study, the ability of patients with advanced melanoma to respond to programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) immune checkpoint inhibitors depended on the presence of a diverse microbiome...
In a post hoc analysis of the UK ACT II trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Glynne-Jones et al found that the best time to assess for complete response to chemoradiotherapy in patients with anal squamous cell carcinoma is at approximately 26 weeks from the start of treatment. In the ACT II...
The traditional three-phase clinical trial process for testing new drugs does not necessarily make sense when it comes to targeted therapies, according to many experts, including regulators, academic researchers, industry chief executive officers, and patient advocates alike. Instead of three...
Researchers from the School of Health Sciences at the University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom, have completed the first-ever systematic review of cancer survivors’ experience of online and telephone telehealth interventions in cancer care, according to a recent study reported by Anna Cox,...
According to Michael Boyer, MD, a medical oncologist at the Chris O’Brien Lifehouse in Sydney, Australia, the development of testing for programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) has been complex. Efforts at harmonization have been made, but most laboratories actually use a single...