Understanding what consciousness is, and why and how it evolved, is perhaps the greatest mystery known to science. With its 100 billion or so neurons and a processing rate of about 4 billion bits per second, the human brain is a miraculously complicated entity, much of which is still under...
THE COMMUNITY ONCOLOGY ALLIANCE (COA) is pleased to announce the election of new members to the Board of Directors and Executive Committee. Additionally, the COA Board has launched and nominated participants for a dedicated standing committee on Government Affairs and Policy as well as Payment...
This past December, nearly 400 medical professionals from a variety of fields—including medical oncology, palliative care, science, nursing, social work, and psychology—and 23 countries traveled to Atlanta, to attend the 2nd Global Adolescent & Young Adult (AYA) Cancer Congress. The 3-day...
Nivolumab (Opdivo) plus ipilimumab (Yervoy) led to a 1-year overall survival rate of 85% in previously treated metastatic colorectal cancer patients with DNA mismatch repair–deficient (dMMR) or microsatellite instability–high (MSI-H) tumors. These data were presented in the first report ...
The ASCO Post’s Integrative Oncology series is intended to facilitate the availability of evidence-based information on integrative and complementary therapies commonly used by patients with cancer. In this installment, Channing Paller, MD, explores the role of pomegranate- and grape-based...
ON JANUARY 15, 2018, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the use of arsenic trioxide (Trisenox) injection in combination with tretinoin for the treatment of adults with newly diagnosed low-risk acute promyelocytic leukemia whose disease is characterized by the presence of the...
Immune checkpoint inhibitors have had a dramatic impact on survival for patients with stage IV non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), with whispers that a cure might be achieved in a subset of patients. In typical fashion, active new agents are evaluated in earlier stages of disease. Stage III NSCLC...
Levine Cancer Institute (LCI) has announced a new Department of Supportive Oncology, helmed by palliative medicine pioneer Declan Walsh, MD. Under the leadership of Dr. Walsh, the new department will integrate its services throughout the Institute. The department includes cancer rehabilitation,...
Updated results were recently reported from the 30 patient safety lead-in of the phase III BEACON CRC trial evaluating the triplet combination of encorafenib (a BRAF inhibitor), binimetinib (an MEK inhibitor), and cetuximab (Erbitux, an anti–EGFR antibody) in patients with BRAF-mutant...
Mary Beckerle, PhD, Chief Executive -Officer and Director of Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah, is this year’s recipient of the Alfred G. Knudson Award in Cancer Genetics from the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The prestigious award is named after Alfred G. Knudson, MD, PhD, a...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Bryan J. Schneider, MD, of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and colleagues, ASCO has endorsed the recently released American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) evidence-based guideline on stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) in early...
FOR DAYS BEFORE HURRICANE HARVEY was expected to move toward Houston, Texas, on Sunday, August 27, 2017, after pummeling other cities in Texas and Louisiana, the leadership team at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (MD Anderson) in Houston strategized on how to ensure the...
AT THE START OF 2018, seven senior employees assumed new roles at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. Five of these program leaders were promoted or reappointed, and two have newly joined the Institute from other centers around the United States. Meet the Appointees Charles...
THE CANCER death rate dropped 1.7% from 2014 to 2015, continuing a drop that began in 1991 and has reached 26%, resulting in nearly 2.4 million fewer cancer deaths during that time. The data are reported in “Cancer Statistics, 2018,” the American Cancer Society’s comprehensive annual report on...
Oncology occupational therapist Mackenzi Pergolotti, PhD, OTR/L, was born in Buffalo, New York. “I lived there until I was 6,” she shared. “Then my family moved around the state a bit, finally settling in the small town of Bath, situated near the Finger Lakes—a beautiful area in central New ...
Debuting this year, “Your Stories: Conquering Cancer” are unscripted conversations among doctors, patients, and caregivers who have been affected by cancer. The Conquer Cancer Foundation produced the mini-podcast series through the award-winning StoryCorps organization, a national nonprofit...
PURCHASE A pair of limited edition ASCO’s Conquer Cancer Foundation Nike Roshe LD-1000 sneakers, available exclusively from Conquer Cancer. The sneakers celebrate 15.5 million cancer survivors across the United States and are a great way to start the new year on the right foot! Sizes are limited;...
Howard A. “Skip” Burris III, MD, FACP, FASCO, a long-time member and volunteer, has been elected to serve as the President of ASCO for the term beginning in June 2019. He will take office as President-Elect during the ASCO Annual Meeting in Chicago in June 2018. Additionally, five members were...
FOX CHASE CANCER CENTER is pleased to welcome Board-certified radiologist Laura Levin, MD, as Assistant Professor in the Department of Diagnostic Imaging. Dr. Levin assumed her new position on January 2, 2018. Dr. Levin comes to Fox Chase Cancer Center from a high-volume private practice in which ...
The monoclonal antibody ramucirumab (Cyramza) was evaluated as first-line therapy for the treatment of metastatic gastric or gastroesophageal junction adenocarcinoma in the international phase III RAINFALL trial. Charles Fuchs, MD, of Yale New Haven Health in Connecticut, presented findings...
Findings from the phase II KEYNOTE-224 trial investigating the use of pembrolizumab (Keytruda) in patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma who were previously treated with sorafenib (Nexavar) were presented by Zhu et al at the 2018 Gastrointestinal (GI) Cancers Symposium in San Francisco...
“There is huge potential to positively influence a patient’s experience and outcomes” by addressing concerns about sexual function after cancer treatment early in the course of treatment planning, Stacy Tessler Lindau, MD, MA, stated in her keynote address at the 11th Annual Oncofertility...
“Several new drugs that have been approved for the treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) are changing the landscape of this disease. CLL is associated with a long survival, so we will need longer follow-up to see how deep the responses are,” said Robert Brodsky, MD, Director of...
Venetoclax (Venclexta) plus rituximab (Rituxan)—a non–chemotherapy-containing regimen—was superior to standard-of-care bendamustine plus rituximab for patients with relapsed or refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), according to a final analysis of the phase III MURANO study reported at...
Primary analysis of the JULIET trial adds to mounting evidence that chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy is effective for the treatment of lymphoma in patients with no other good treatment options. A single infusion of CAR T cells (CTL019) achieved durable remissions in almost 40% of...
Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have discovered that the risk of death from breast cancer is twice as high for patients with high heterogeneity of the estrogen receptor within the same tumor, compared to patients with low heterogeneity. The study, published by Lindström et al in ...
Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have provided the first description of the structure of the herpes virus associated with Kaposi’s sarcoma. The findings, published by Dai et al in Nature, answer important questions about how the virus spreads and provide a...
Older patients with Hodgkin lymphoma typically do not fare as well as younger patients on standard regimens. A phase II study reported the best outcomes to date in older patients with Hodgkin lymphoma who were treated with sequential brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris) before and after a regimen of...
Can aggressive treatment of high-risk smoldering multiple myeloma patients prevent disease worsening? A carfilzomib (Kyprolis)-based regimen and autologous stem cell transplant (ASCT) plus maintenance produced encouraging outcomes in the phase II GEM-CESAR study by the Spanish Myeloma Group. The...
Here is an update on five different studies featured at the 2017 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition. Topics center on possible newer treatment regimens in both Hodgkin and Burkitt lymphomas, relapsed or refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and newly...
In patients with early breast cancer, the presence in the blood of circulating tumor cells 5 years after diagnosis increases the risk for recurrence nearly 20-fold, researchers reported at the 2017 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.1 “We found that a single positive circulating tumor cell assay...
Steven Vogl, MD, of Bronx, New York, commented that the results after pathologic complete response [pCR] in the I-SPY 2 study are “extraordinarily good,” and Eric P. Winer, MD, FASCO, Thompson Chair in Breast Cancer Research and Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, said the...
More evidence of the power of pathologic complete response (pCR) now comes from an update of the multicenter, adaptively randomized I-SPY 2 trial. In a study reported at the 2017 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, pCR predicted for event-free and distant disease–free survival in high-risk...
For more than a decade, breast cancer experts have wondered whether women with low levels of HER2 might derive some benefit from trastuzumab (Herceptin), based on signals seen in earlier trastuzumab trials. Most notably, in the landmark National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project (NSABP) ...
The anti-CCR4 monoclonal antibody mogamulizumab may answer an unmet need in providing an effective treatment of cutaneous T-cell lymphoma. In the phase III MAVORIC trial reported at the 2017 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition, treatment with mogamulizumab was...
The oncology community mourns the sudden passing of Jimmie C. Holland, MD, who died on December 24, 2017, at the age of 89. Dr. Holland’s achievements over her 40-year career are legend. They include the founding of the subspecialty of psycho-oncology, the establishment of a full-time Psychiatry...
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” —Albert Einstein The phase III international ECHELON-1 study, designed to evaluate brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris) as part of a front-line chemotherapy regimen for previously untreated advanced classic...
The Oncology Center of Excellence of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is informing health-care providers about new safety information for rolapitant (Varubi) injectable emulsion, a substance P/neurokinin (NK-1) receptor antagonist indicated for the prevention of delayed nausea and...
Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) accepted for Priority Review a supplemental Biologics License Application (sBLA) for tisagenlecleucel (Kymriah) suspension for intravenous infusion (formerly CTL019) for the treatment of adult patients with relapsed or refractory diffuse large...
The Association of Community Cancer Centers (ACCC) 8th annual Trending Now in Cancer Care survey, conducted in partnership with Advisory Board’s Oncology Roundtable, has identified current and emerging trends across U.S. cancer programs. When asked to identify the top threats to future cancer ...
On January 15, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the use of arsenic trioxide (Trisenox) injection in combination with tretinoin for the treatment of adults with newly-diagnosed low-risk acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL) whose APL is characterized by the presence of the t(15;17)...
A new study has found that a test that identifies circulating tumor cells (CTCs) present in the bloodstream can detect colorectal cancer at an early stage, with accuracy ranging from 84% to 88%. Most prior studies using CTCs have been able to detect late-stage colorectal cancer, and this study is...
Nonsmoking adolescents who use e-cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, or tobacco water pipes are more likely to start smoking conventional cigarettes within a year, according to new research by the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Findings were published by Watkins et al in JAMA...
Patients with certain head and neck cancers who test positive for high-risk types of human papillomavirus (HPV) have a better prognosis and may need less aggressive treatment. To help ensure that patients with these cancers are accurately diagnosed and effectively treated, the College of...
In a retrospective claims-based study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Doshi et al found that higher out-of-pocket costs were associated with increased rates of prescription abandonment for novel oral anticancer agents. Study Details The study involved data on 38,111 patients from...
The most commonly used gene expression profile test used to help predict breast cancer recurrence may not be as cost-effective as once thought, say a team of researchers led by scientists from Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. Their study, published by Chandler et al in the Journal...
Increasing use of a potentially life-saving treatment for metastatic cancer is leaving too many vulnerable patients behind, according to a new study from Yale Cancer Center/Smilow Cancer Hospital published by Kann et al in JNCCN – Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. The...
A new genetic-based model may explain how ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) progresses to a more invasive form of cancer, say researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The study provides new insight into how DCIS leads to invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) and provides a clearer...
The cancer death rate dropped 1.7% from 2014 to 2015, continuing a drop that began in 1991 and has reached 26%, resulting in nearly 2.4 million fewer cancer deaths during that time. The data is reported in “Cancer Statistics, 2018,” the American Cancer Society’s...
The proteasome inhibitor carfilzomib (Kyprolis) has taken on an increasing role in the treatment of multiple myeloma, but new research from the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania shows the therapy may come with the risk of cardiovascular problems in a higher than expected...