An article in The New York Times about women who had chosen not to have reconstruction following breast cancer surgery might prompt questions from newly diagnosed patients considering their options.1 Deanna J. Attai, MD, FACS, told The ASCO Post that whenever an article on breast cancer appears in...
A “nascent movement to ‘go flat’” is how an article in The New York Times characterized the decisions by some women to opt out of reconstruction following surgery for breast cancer.1 The article examined the reasons several patients made that decision, which included avoiding multiple surgeries and ...
Elisabeth Heath, MD, FACP, Leader of the Genitourinary Oncology Multidisciplinary Team and the Patricia C. and E. Jan Hartmann Endowed Chair for Prostate Cancer Research at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, was recently honored with the Michigan Cancer Consortium’s inaugural Champion...
It was 1983, and I was in my third year as an attending physician at a major East Coast university medical center and just 5 years out of fellowship. As was common at the time, I saw and treated all malignancies except leukemia and gynecologic cancers. In the middle of a typically busy day at the ...
The University of Nebraska Board of Regents voted to rename an area of the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) in honor of a longtime professor who has made extraordinary contributions to the institution. The Center for Leukemia and Lymphoma Research, established in 2003, was renamed by...
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Rockefeller University, and Weill Cornell Medicine have announced that they have established a new drug discovery company called Bridge Medicines. Launched in partnership with Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Ltd and health-care investment firms Bay City Capital ...
The American Society of Hematology (ASH) will honor Zhu Chen, MD, PhD, of Shanghai Institute of Hematology, and Hugues de Thé, MD, PhD, of Collège de France, with the 2016 Ernest Beutler Lecture and Prize for their significant research advances in the area of acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL)....
It was mid-morning, and I was walking along one of the long corridors in our hospital, attending to clinical duties. From a distance, I noticed this elderly couple walking in the opposite direction. As we got closer, it became obvious that the elderly gentleman appeared winded and was looking...
Impaired sleep quality is a concerning problem for many patients with cancer, and pharmacologic treatments come with many negative effects. Several small studies indicate that yoga improves persistent fatigue, sleep disturbance, anxiety, and quality of life, in addition to reducing the need for ...
It should not come as a surprise to anyone who has read Dr. Paul Kalanithi’s brilliant—and unforgettable—memoir, When Breath Becomes Air (Random House, 2016), that nearly a year after publication, it remains on The New York Times best-seller list, its popularity only increasing with time. Written...
Next to me sounds the buzzing of my Lympha Press machine, which substitutes for the constant visits of the physiotherapist who performs the lymph drainage. This gives me more freedom, and we have more privacy at home. I can use the machine whenever I need it, and my 5-year-old daughter, Christina, ...
Over the past few years, the term value-based cancer care has become integrated into the vernacular of the oncology community. Value is a subjective term, which is defined largely by its clinical setting. However, value in cancer care is evaluated by the multiple stakeholders involved in the...
The Association of Community Cancer Centers (ACCC) honored Cary A. Presant, MD, FACP, FASCO, with the prestigious David King Community Clinical Scientist Award, for his demonstrated leadership in the development, participation, and evaluation of clinical studies for cancer patients. Throughout his ...
A relatively recent study by Areej El-Jawahri, MD, and her colleagues is showing how the use of visual media can empower patients with advanced cancer, as well as other life-threatening illnesses, to make more informed decisions about their end-of-life care.1 The aim of Dr. El-Jawahri’s study was ...
Biosimilars are among the newest threads in the fabric of cancer treatment in the United States, and they are spawning numerous questions for oncologists and patients with cancer. Many of these questions were taken up by participants in a recent Washington forum on “The Future of the U.S....
Charles G. Drake, MD, PhD, has joined NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center as Director of Genitourinary Oncology and Associate Director for Clinical Research at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Drake will also serve as Co-Director of Columbia’s Cancer...
In renal cell carcinoma and other cancer types, a consistent paradigm in drug development exists: Observe efficacy of a drug in the metastatic setting and move quickly to explore the agent in the adjuvant setting. In the cytokine era, there were multiple efforts to characterize whether adjuvant...
On October 24, 2016, pembrolizumab (Keytruda) was approved for use in patients with metastatic non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) whose tumors have high programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) expression (tumor proportion score ≥ 50%) as determined by a U.S. Food and Drug Administration...
Formal discussant Laurence Albiges, MD, PhD, of Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France, tried to put the results of KEYNOTE-052 and CheckMate 275 into perspective. “Anti–PD-1 (programmed cell death protein 1) and anti–PD-L1 (programmed cell death ligand 1) agents represent a revolution in the...
Immunotherapy with anti–PD-1 (programmed cell death protein 1) and anti–PD-L1 (programmed cell death ligand 1) agents continues to advance in metastatic urothelial cancer, with positive showings in two clinical trials presented at the 2016 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress. The...
In studies presented at the 2016 European Society for Surgical Oncology (ESMO) Congress, two different neoadjuvant treatment approaches improved the outcomes of patients with esophageal cancer. Investigators from the Australasian Gastro-Intestinal Trials Group (AGITG) reported that the addition of...
Most women with hormone receptor–positive breast cancer receive endocrine therapy as part of their treatment, but “the reality is that patients who receive antihormone therapy in the metastatic disease setting ultimately develop disease progression, ” William J. Gradishar, MD, stated at the 18th...
Although there are no androgen receptor antagonists currently approved for the treatment of breast cancer, clinical trials indicate that these agents benefit some patients with triple-negative breast cancer, Tiffany A. Traina, MD, told participants at the 18th Annual Lynn Sage Breast Cancer...
Cutaneous T-cell lymphomas are a heterogeneous group of cancers. Some subtypes of cutaneous T-cell lymphomas are often misdiagnosed as benign skin diseases, making it challenging to gather reliable epidemiologic data. At the 3rd World Congress of Cutaneous Lymphomas (sponsored by the International...
Immunotherapy with an anti–programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) inhibitor—pembrolizumab (Keytruda)—showed encouraging responses in patients with advanced cutaneous T-cell lymphoma (either mycosis fungoides or Sézary syndrome). Pembrolizumab achieved a 38% overall response rate and responses...
In 2016 and 2017, a team from The Ralph Lauren Center for Cancer Care (RLCCC) is participating in an ASCO Quality Improvement Grant program, which is supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. The grant program aims to improve the delivery of cancer care in medically underserved communities by...
Share the message of hope, strength, and a world free from the fear of cancer with greeting cards and eCertificates from the Conquer Cancer Foundation (CCF). In appreciation of your gift, CCF will mail or ship greeting cards, or e-mail eCertificates. Cards and eCertificates feature artwork created ...
CancerLinQ LLC, a wholly owned nonprofit of ASCO, has announced that more than 1 million patient records are now in the CancerLinQ™ platform. In addition, 70 practices have signed agreements to participate in CancerLinQ™, representing more than 1,500 oncologists. “We are excited to reach this...
Dear Friends: Each year, the Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO (CCF) Grants and Awards Ceremony is one of the highlights of the ASCO Annual Meeting. While most of the week in Chicago is packed with meetings, events, and presentations, the Grants and Awards Ceremony is a time for everyone to stop,...
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 of ...
Commenting on this talk during the discussion afterward, Youn Kim, MD, of Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California, said: “At our center, we use high-throughput sequencing of T-cell receptors daily in patients with cutaneous T-cell lymphomas, and it is a billable service paid...
High-throughput sequencing of T-cell receptors may be a solution to some of the challenges confronting oncologists who treat cutaneous T-cell lymphomas. According to experts who presented talks on high-throughput sequencing of T-cell receptors at the 3rd World Congress of Cutaneous Lymphoma...
Johns Hopkins Medicine specialists reported they have developed a urine test for the likely emergence of cervical cancer that is highly accurate compared to other tests based on genetic markers derived directly from cervical tissue. The new urine test, they said, is different because it analyzes...
The current plethora of drugs in development for oncology is leading to the testing of novel agents in common as well as rare diseases. Targeted therapies have been a focus of great interest in soft-tissue sarcomas, with testing of a variety of oral tyrosine kinase inhibitors leading to the...
In an article in The New England Journal of Medicine, Johnson et al reported the occurrence of fulminant, fatal immune-related myocarditis in two patients who received combined ipilimumab (Yervoy) and nivolumab (Opdivo) for metastatic melanoma. Patient Courses One patient was a 65-year-old woman...
Commenting on ASCEND-5, Alice T. Shaw, MD, PhD, Director of Thoracic Oncology at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, Boston, noted that it is the first randomized study to examine how a second-generation anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) inhibitor compares to standard second-line...
For patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) harboring the ALK gene rearrangement, ceritinib (Zykadia) provided longer progression-free survival than chemotherapy in patients previously treated with chemotherapy and crizotinib (Xalkori), but gastrointestinal toxicity was...
Invited discussant Paul Baas, MD, PhD, of The Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam, first commented on the need for measures to improve outcomes in early-stage non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). “Even in stage I patients, we still have a failure rate of 30% to 40% at 5 years, and that...
Earlier this month, ASCO announced it has collaborated with Innovative Oncology Business Solutions, Inc (IOBS) to launch ASCO COME HOME, a patient-centered oncology medical home, to help transition community oncology practices from volume-based care to value-based care and to prepare oncologists to ...
Neoadjuvant immunotherapy with the programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) inhibitor nivolumab (Opdivo) is safe and feasible in early-stage non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The results come from the first report of PD-1 blockade prior to surgery in this tumor, according to Patrick Forde, MD, of...
Earlier this year, Sean Parker, the cofounder of the music streaming service Napster and an early president of Facebook, joined a growing list of entrepreneurs who are committing large portions of their wealth to funding cancer research. In April, Mr. Parker announced he was donating $250 million...
The Commack, Long Island–based hospital of Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center was opened in 2002, providing personalized cancer care closer to home for individuals living on eastern Long Island. Now, more than 14 years later, MSK is reinforcing its commitment to the local community in...
As reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post, Brian Rini, MD, and colleagues recently reported results from the phase III IMPRINT trial,1 which randomized HLA-A*02–positive patients with treatment-naive metastatic clear cell variant renal cell carcinoma, in favorable- and intermediate- risk...
For the first time, a randomized trial has provided good evidence to support the use of neoadjuvant chemotherapy for treatment of high-risk soft-tissue sarcoma of the extremities or trunk wall.1 But the findings of the study were surprising, because neoadjuvant chemotherapy with one-size-fits-all...
“This study represents a significant step forward in the treatment of recurrent ovarian cancer,” stated formal discussant Sandro Pignata, MD, of the IRCCS National Cancer Institute “Fondazione G. Pascale,” Naples, Italy. He highlighted some key factors: Patients selected for the study were those...
A landmark study showed that the investigational PARP (poly ADP-ribose polymerase) 1/2 inhibitor niraparib, when used as maintenance therapy, significantly improves the outcome of platinum-sensitive recurrent ovarian cancer. Specifically, niraparib significantly prolonged progression-free survival ...
Allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation is the only potentially curative treatment for myelofibrosis. The ASCO Post asked an expert in this field, Ayalew Tefferi, MD, how and when he uses stem cell transplant in myelofibrosis, which is a topic he outlined in greater detail in the...
November is National Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month, the impetus for this article. Pancreatic cancer is a huge health challenge. It's the eighth most common cancer in the United States and the fourth most common cause of cancer deaths but is expected to become the second most common cause of...
Genomic assays have had a powerful influence on the management of early-stage breast cancer, particularly estrogen receptor–positive tumors. The mainstay of adjuvant treatment for early-stage, hormone receptor–positive breast cancer has been endocrine therapy, either with tamoxifen and an...
We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in lung cancer. In the past 2 years, the anti–programmed cell death protein 1 (anti–PD-1) inhibitors nivolumab (Opdivo) and pembrolizumab (Keytruda) were found to improve overall survival in the second-line setting compared with docetaxel for patients with...