THE ASCO ANSWERS Palliative Care booklet shares how palliative care or supportive care is used to manage symptoms and side effects; help with practical concerns; address spiritual questions; and support caregivers, family, and friends. Your patients will find: Practical advice on how to access...
ON SEPTEMBER 25–26, oncology care providers from across the United States will head to Capitol Hill to participate in the 3rd annual ASCO Advocacy Summit. Over 2 days, ASCO volunteer advocates will meet with members of Congress and their staff to educate them on critical issues affecting patients...
HOW DO patients really feel when they are in your care? What does it feel like to cure a cancer? How are the children of oncologists affected when grief is a parent’s occupational hazard? They are the personal topics explored in the candid and inspirational mini-podcast series, Your Stories:...
Research grants are vital to the success of academic research and researchers apply for these grants at all stages of their career. This makes writing stand-out grant applications an incredibly valuable skill for clinical investigators—and an intimidating task for first-time grant applicants....
Cory Wiegert has been named Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of CancerLinQ LLC, a wholly owned nonprofit subsidiary of ASCO. Mr. Wiegert, a proven expert in building and successfully launching innovative technology solutions, began his new role on August 13, 2018, and is overseeing the continued...
ASCO offers a portfolio of prestigious leadership training opportunities for those who are ready to take the next step in their careers. This includes the Leadership Development Program (LDP), a program that began in 2009 and was created to teach mid-career oncologists leadership skills and help...
The information contained in this Clinical Trials Resource Guide includes actively recruiting clinical studies focused on targeted therapy in thyroid cancer. These trials are studying immunosuppressants, combination therapies, tyrosine kinase inhibitor treatment, mitigation of treatment side...
The tumultuous history of modern South Africa has numerous stories that lie beneath the surface of the sociopolitical headlines, such as the story of lung cancer expert Leora Horn, MD. “I was born and reared in Johannesburg, South Africa, a second-generation African family. In 1987, because of the...
THE GEORGETOWN Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center has developed and released a cache of brain cancer biomedical data and made them freely available to researchers worldwide. The database, referred to as REMBRANDT (Repository for Molecular Brain Neoplasia Data), contains information on 671 adult...
Male breast cancer is a rare and understudied malignancy when compared with female breast cancer, with conflicting literature on survival outcomes in men and women. The ASCO Post spoke recently with breast cancer expert Sharon Giordano, MD, MPH, FASCO, Professor at The University of Texas MD...
Patients with advanced cancer often get more aggressive treatment than they want because too few oncologists elicit their end-of-life treatment preferences.1,2 In response to this problem, leading associations, including ASCO3,4 and the Institute of Medicine,5 have called for more advance care...
As the population continues to age, the interplay between aging and cancer increasingly shows cancer to be a disease of older people. By the year 2030, there will be an increased incidence of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) in older individuals.1 The median age of patients diagnosed with diffuse large...
USING THE National Cancer Database, Bhatt et al1 recently reported that of the 61,775 adults with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), those who received chemotherapy from 2003 to 2011 lived longer than those who, in those same years, did not; the study is reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post....
IN A STUDY of National Cancer Database data reported in Blood Advances, Vijaya Raj Bhatt, MD, of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and colleagues found that 25% of patients with newly diagnosed acute myeloid leukemia (AML) did not receive initial chemotherapy, despite evidence that...
COMMENTING ON the importance of this topic at a press conference during the 2018 Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer (MASCC)/International Society of Oral Oncology (ISOO) Annual Meeting, Ian Olver, MD, PhD, Immediate Past President of MASCC and Director of the University of...
IN PATIENTS with locally advanced squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck, nimotuzumab—a humanized monoclonal antibody against the epidermal growth factor receptor—in combination with cisplatin and radiotherapy was superior to cisplatin and radiotherapy alone in improving progression-free...
AS MORE is learned about the genomic landscape in non-Hodgkin lymphoma, clinicians are grappling with how to apply this information in the clinic. At the 2018 Pan Pacific Lymphoma Conference, Andrew D. Zelenetz, MD, PhD, helped them understand this emerging area.1 Dr. Zelenetz is Professor of...
As novel therapies come on board for treating relapsed or refractory Hodgkin lymphoma, the field is advancing toward more personalized therapy. The goal, even in the advanced-disease setting, is to increase the chances of complete response and negative positron-emission tomography (PET), while...
In triple-negative breast cancer, researchers have so far been unable to identify markers that can classify patients by prognosis or probability of responding to different treatments. In a study published by Zagorac et al in Nature Communications, researchers from the Spanish National Cancer...
More than 130 iconic buildings and landmarks across the United States and Canada will be illuminated in a show of support for the 6th biennial Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) “roadblock” telecast airing in both countries on Friday, September 7 (8:00–9:00 PM ...
Widespread use of antiretroviral therapy in the treatment of patients infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has led to a decline in the incidence of HIV-related Kaposi sarcoma, an incurable malignancy associated with HIV. Nevertheless, about 15% of these patients will go on to...
U.S. Senator from Arizona John McCain passed away on August 25, 2018. The cause of death was glioblastoma multiforme. A number of medical societies issued statements remembering Senator McCain, a few of which are reprinted below. The ASCO Post shares in remembering Senator McCain for his service to ...
In a study reported in JAMA Oncology, Aaron M. Goodman, MD, of the University of California, San Diego Moores Center for Personalized Cancer Therapy, and colleagues found amplification of PDL1 genes in 0.7% of solid tumors, including more than 100 tumor types. Response to checkpoint inhibition was ...
A MAN in his early 70s sits in our office. His general health is good, and he is feeling well. Yet he is deeply worried. Four years ago, when his prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level rapidly increased after radical prostatectomy and subsequent radiation therapy, he was started on...
“The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath.” —William Shakespeare THESE LINES from The Merchant of Venice suggest that mercy should be freely given. However, the metrics of quality is strained, pouring like a thunderous storm obscuring...
A new method may predict the course of human papillomavirus (HPV)-negative head and neck cancer after radiochemotherapy. According to findings published by Hess et al in Clinical Cancer Research, five microRNAs (miRNAs) may be able to provide the decisive data. Squamous cell carcinomas of the head ...
BOOKMARK Title: The Cookie Cure: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of Cookies and CancerAuthors: Susan Stachler With Laura StachlerPublisher: SourcebooksPublication date: February 2018Price: $19.95, paperback, 320 pages Cancer memoirs vary in their voice and message. Some are slapstick humorous attempts to ...
As reported by Winter et al in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, findings in the Children’s Oncology Group (COG) AALL0434 trial indicate improved outcomes with a COG methotrexate intensification regimen vs a high-dose methotrexate intensification regimen in children and young adults with...
In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Zheng et al found a high frequency of inherited breast cancer among Nigerian women, with presence of deleterious mutations posing very high risk of disease. As noted by the investigators, “…Among Nigerian women, breast cancer is ...
In a study reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Fahrmann et al developed and validated a plasma-derived metabolite panel that distinguished early-stage pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) with high accuracy. Accuracy was further improved with the addition of a previously...
The ASCO Post’s Integrative Oncology series is intended to facilitate the availability of evidence-based information on integrative and complementary therapies sometimes used by patients with cancer. Ting Bao, MD, DABMA, MS, and Jyothirmai Gubili, MS, present information on the potential...
Karen E. Knudsen, PhD, Enterprise Director of the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center (SKCC), Jefferson Health, has been elected Vice President/President-Elect of the Association of American Cancer Institutes’ (AACI) Board of Directors, a 2-year term that will begin September 30. Dr. Knudsen, who has...
The ASCO Post is pleased to reproduce installments of the Art of Oncology as published previously in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. These articles focus on the experience of suffering from cancer or of caring for people diagnosed with cancer, and they include narratives, topical essays,...
On July 10, 2018, ipilimumab (Yervoy) was granted accelerated approval for use in combination with nivolumab (Opdivo) for the treatment of patients at least 12 years of age with microsatellite instability–high (MSI-H) or mismatch repair–deficient (dMMR) metastatic colorectal cancer progressing...
Andrea Hayes-Jordan, MD, FACS, FAAP, a pioneering surgeon and researcher, has been named Chief of the Division of Pediatric Surgery at the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine and Surgeon-in-Chief at the North Carolina Children’s Hospital. She officially joined the UNC School of...
Advanced practice providers (APPs) have increasingly become integral members of the oncology care delivery team, according to the first large-scale study of nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) in oncology. The study was conducted collaboratively by ASCO, the American Academy of ...
GUEST EDITOR The ASCO Post is pleased to continue this special feature on the worldwide cancer burden. Each installment focuses on a country from one of the six regions of the world, as defined by the World Health Organization (ie, Africa, the Americas, South-East Asia, Europe, Eastern...
In 2009, as Richard L. Schilsky, MD, FACP, FSCT, FASCO, was preparing his Presidential Address for that year’s ASCO Annual Meeting, he came across his 6th grade essay titled “My Ambition,” which foretold with eerie specificity the career path he would follow over the next 6 decades. In the paper,...
Subsolid nodules can be considered a biomarker of lung cancer risk and should be managed with long-term active surveillance. Conservative management of subsolid nodules may reduce unnecessary surgery and overtreatment in patients with multiple comorbidities and aggressive lung cancer arising from...
In 2016, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF) launched the Drug Research Collaborative, a program the foundation developed to bridge the gap between academic investigators and their access to therapies under investigation and to encourage greater academia-driven research in breast cancer....
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently accepted a supplemental biologics license application (sBLA) for dasatinib in combination with chemotherapy for the treatment of pediatric patients with newly diagnosed Philadelphia chromosome (Ph)-positive acute lymphoblastic leukemia...
In a Children’s Oncology Group phase I/II trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Cole et al found that the combination of brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris) and gemcitabine was active in pediatric and young adult patients with relapsed or refractory Hodgkin lymphoma. As noted by the...
Sex-based approaches to studying and treating disease have remained largely unexplored in medical oncology, despite the field’s growing interest in precision medicine and accumulating evidence that sex is a major factor in disease risk and response to treatment. At an upcoming European...
In the phase III FILM study reported in The Lancet Oncology, Frumovitz et al found that near-infrared fluorescence imaging with indocyanine green dye identified more sentinel nodes vs isosulfan blue dye in women with clinical stage I endometrial or cervical cancer undergoing curative surgery. There ...
Cancer may be linked to an increased risk of death and prehospitalization in patients with broken heart syndrome, according to research presented by Santoro et al at the 2018 European Society of Cardiology Congress. Study author Francesco Santoro, MD, of the University of Foggia, Italy, said, ...
In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Devarakonda et al found that high nonsynonymous tumor mutation burden was associated with improved outcomes in patients undergoing resection for non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Study Details The study (Lung Adjuvant Cisplatin...
In the phase II CheckMate 204 study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Tawbi et al found that combined nivolumab (Opdivo) and ipilimumab (Yervoy) produced a high rate of intracranial clinical benefit in patients with melanoma brain metastases. Study Details The study included 94...
In a long-term follow-up of a phase III trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Hoffman et al found that dose-escalated moderately hypofractionated intensity-modulated radiation therapy (HIMRT) improved disease control and reduced treatment duration vs conventionally fractionated IMRT...
The number of adolescents who are up to date on human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination—meaning they started and completed the HPV vaccine series—increased 5 percentage points from 2016 to 2017, according to results from a national survey published by Walker et al in Morbidity and...
The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) has released an evidence report assessing the comparative clinical effectiveness and value of antiandrogen therapies for the treatment of nonmetastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. The report focuses on three antiandrogen...