In a study reported in JCO Oncology Practice, Shi et al found that use of higher-than-currently-recommended severity thresholds for symptom alerts for patients receiving outpatient chemotherapy would result in failure to identify and treat many patients requiring clinical intervention for ...
Scott Kopetz, MD, PhD, FACP, works to improve outcomes for patients with colorectal cancer at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The trial: Single drugs aimed at inhibiting the BRAF gene have not been effective against BRAF-mutated colorectal cancers. To explore the effectiveness...
The Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI) recently announced the appointment of Frederic Pla, PhD, as its Chief Operating Officer (COO). Dr. Pla will lead day-to-day operations and work with the Institute’s leadership team to establish goals for performance, expansion, and sustainable...
Over the past decade, obesity has been linked to an increased risk and aggressiveness of numerous cancer types. Many biologic activities within adipose tissue change with obesity and may contribute to carcinogenesis and the initiation of cancer. To shed light on the current state of knowledge in...
The 2019 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition featured a cornucopia of sessions. It was impossible to attend all the lectures, symposia, oral presentations, poster presentations, and special events because many were concurrent. Below, we have selected some...
Can patients with breast cancer who achieve an “exceptional response” to neoadjuvant therapy safely forgo surgery? That is a question being seriously explored in multinational trials. “We’ve known for a long time that we can eliminate disease in many patients if they have chemosensitive tumors....
Several novel strategies for the treatment of patients with stage III or IV melanoma showed promise in studies presented at the 2020 ASCO-SITC Clinical Immuno-Oncology Symposium.1,2 Vaccine for High-Risk Patients After Resection A tumor lysate, particle-loaded, dendritic cell (TLPLDC) vaccine was...
The treatment of colorectal cancer has always been something of an art—but never more so than during the COVID-19 pandemic. The ASCO Post asked three experts in this malignancy to share their concerns and their approaches to achieving good patient outcomes while minimizing the risk of COVID-19...
New data from the phase III EMBRACA trial showed the poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitor talazoparib did not produce a statistically significant overall survival benefit for patients with locally advanced or metastatic HER2-negative germline BRCA-mutated breast cancer. Most patients...
ASCO and Conquer Cancer, the ASCO Foundation®, are proud to recognize the winners of ASCO’s 2020 Special Awards and Conquer Cancer’s Women Who Conquer Cancer Mentorship Awards. The recipients of these awards have worked to transform cancer care around the world. David A. Karnofsky Memorial Award...
On March 31, 2020, the US Oncology Network (The Network) named cancer researcher Robert L. Coleman, MD, FACOG, FACS, as its new Chief Scientific Officer. In this role, Dr. Coleman will be the senior-most clinician scientist on The US Oncology Network leadership. Dr. Coleman, who most recently...
Texas Oncology recently announced a major expansion of its telemedicine services to allow patients to schedule virtual visits with more than 400 physicians and 150 advanced practice providers throughout the statewide cancer care practice. Through this expanded approach, launched earlier this month, ...
The individualization and optimization of adjuvant endocrine therapy for breast cancer are important and not always simple. Guidance on this issue was offered at the 2020 Miami Breast Cancer Conference by Joyce O’Shaughnessy, MD, the Celebrating Woman Chair in Breast Cancer Research at Baylor...
A retrospective analysis from the Southwest Oncology Group S8814 trial, reported by Wendy A. Woodward, MD, PhD, of the Department of Radiation Oncology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and colleagues in JAMA Oncology,1 showed that a low 21-gene assay recurrence score was...
Can patients with cancer and preexisting autoimmune disorders safely benefit from immunotherapy? The answer has been unclear, with only retrospective studies and anecdotal reports guiding oncologists. This subpopulation of patients has largely been excluded from clinical trials out of concerns over ...
For several tumor types, can the successes achieved with immunotherapy in the metastatic and adjuvant settings be replicated in the neoadjuvant setting? An explosion in clinical trials—with more than 300 listed on ClinicalTrials.gov—point to “yes.” “The neoadjuvant use of immunotherapy is of great ...
The microbiome—and the foods that feed it—is emerging as an important determinant of a patient’s response to immunotherapy. Much of the research in this area comes from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, as described at the 2020 ASCO-SITC Clinical Immuno-Oncology Symposium by...
Physician-scientist, Reshma Jagsi, MD, DPhil, was encouraged by her parents to become a politically active, socially conscious citizen of the world. “As a young woman, my mother traveled from Africa on a scholarship to the United States, where she attended the University of Wisconsin. It was in the ...
Semaphorin 4D (SEMA4D, and its receptor, plexin B1) is broadly expressed in malignant tumors. Aside from other “normal functions” in tumors, SEMA4D influences the infiltration and distribution of leukocytes into the microenvironment, and its inhibition promotes functional immune infiltration....
Although patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer typically have limited responses to immunotherapy, a subset of patients with pretreatment evidence of active T-cell responses in their tumors experienced prolonged survival following treatment with ipilimumab in a phase II...
A study published by Naing et al in the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer found that treatment with pembrolizumab demonstrated acceptable toxicity and antitumor activity in patients with four types of advanced, hard-to-treat rare cancers. “Our findings that pembrolizumab has a favorable toxicity...
For patients with previously treated metastatic colorectal cancer harboring BRAF V600E mutations, the phase III BEACON CRC study showed the benefit for combining two or three targeted agents vs the standard of care.1 With further follow-up, the study has now also shown a benefit for the triplet and ...
This past January, the 2020 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium was held in San Francisco. More than 3,600 individuals attended and more than 900 abstracts and posters were presented. Among the highlights presented at the meeting and reported in the pages of The ASCO Post, several studies in...
In a single-institution phase IIb trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Steven H. Lin, MD, PhD, and colleagues found that proton beam therapy was associated with less toxicity and similar progression-free survival vs intensity-modulated radiation therapy in patients with locally...
In a Children’s Oncology Group study (AREN0321) reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Daw et al found that the addition of vincristine/irinotecan to a regimen used in the National Wilms Tumor Study 5 (NWTS-5; vincristine, doxorubicin, cyclophosphamide, carboplatin, and etoposide plus...
On March 11, the World Health Organization (WHO) took the step it had been avoiding for weeks and declared that the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), and the virus that causes it, now identified as SARS-CoV-2, had reached global pandemic levels, the first pandemic sparked by a...
THE ANNUAL INCIDENCE of male breast cancer in the United States is dwarfed by the rate among women. Yet, for the estimated 2,670 men who will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year, life-extending and life-enhancing treatments are crucial.1 To help reduce knowledge gaps and improve mortality and ...
Although bacteria are predominant in the gastrointestinal tract, they also reside on and in other parts of the body, including some unexpected places, such as malignant tumors. There are numerous reports of this phenomenon, but most have not identified a functional role for the microbes. In the...
In a retrospective study reported in The Lancet Oncology, Michael J. Pishvaian, MD, and colleagues found that overall survival was better in patients with pancreatic cancer with actionable molecular alterations who received matched therapies compared with those who received only unmatched therapies ...
Now in its seventh year, the Haploidentical Transplant Symposium (HAPLO) continues to explore advances in haploidentical and other novel cellular therapies. The most recent of these meetings—HAPLO2019—met in Orlando, Florida, 2 days before the start of the 2019 American Society of Hematology (ASH)...
According to research published by Andrea Hayes-Jordan, MD, FACS, and colleagues in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, children and young adults with colon cancer are more likely to have shorter overall survival and recurrence-free survival than middle-aged adults. In a...
ASCO and Conquer Cancer, the ASCO Foundation®, congratulate the recipients of recent Conquer Cancer Merit Awards, which recognize oncology fellows’ and trainees’ high-quality research submitted in abstracts to an ASCO-sponsored or cosponsored meeting. These early-career researchers presented their...
Thirty-three practices received the Quality Oncology Practice Initiative (QOPI®) certification in the fourth quarter of 2019. The Association for Clinical Oncology applauds the work of these practices to ensure a better and healthier future. The following practices achieved QOPI certification or...
A retrospective analysis from the Southwest Oncology Group S8814 trial, reported by Wendy A. Woodward, MD, PhD, of the Department of Radiation Oncology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and colleagues in JAMA Oncology,1 showed that a low 21-gene assay recurrence score was...
The second interim analysis of the phase III SOPHIA trial demonstrated a significant though modest improvement in progression-free survival, response rate, and clinical benefit with the addition of margetuximab to chemotherapy vs trastuzumab plus chemotherapy in patients with HER2-positive...
The investigational oral agent tucatinib added to trastuzumab/capecitabine reduced the risk of death by one-third and reduced the risk of disease progression or death by one-half in patients with heavily pretreated metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer, including those with untreated or previously ...
More than 7,500 specialists in breast oncology from over 90 countries attended the 2019 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) held last December. Researchers convened to present a wide-ranging array of abstracts and posters featuring important new data in the treatment of breast cancer....
The National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN) announced today that the organization is postponing the NCCN 2020 Annual Conference and preconference programs that were scheduled for March 19–22 in Orlando. The gathering for more than 1,500 oncology professionals was going to feature more than 30 ...
Richard E. Champlin, MD, Chairman of the nation’s largest Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapy program at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, was born in Milwaukee and spent his formative years in Chicago. After high school, Dr. Champlin followed an early ambition in...
Comprehensive profiling of tumor samples taken from patients with osteosarcoma showed that multiple factors contribute to the traditionally poor responses observed with immune checkpoint inhibitor treatment in patients with this malignancy, according to new research published by Wu et al in Nature...
Gemtuzumab ozogamicin, once approved in 2000 for the treatment of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), was taken off the market in 2010 due to toxicity concerns. Idarubicin has been used in place of gemtuzumab ozogamicin in some chemotherapy regimens. Gemtuzumab ozogamicin was reintroduced to the market...
For patients with previously treated metastatic colorectal cancer harboring BRAF V600E mutations, the phase III BEACON-CRC study showed the benefit for combining two or three targeted agents vs the standard of care.1 The study has now also shown a benefit for the triplet and doublet in maintaining ...
The ASH 2019 Annual Meeting & Exposition featured countless important sessions and lectures. It would be impossible to attend all the symposia, oral presentations, poster presentations, and special events. Below, we have selected some presentation highlights to supplement our coverage of the...
A comprehensive molecular study of endometrial cancer published by Dou et al in Cell has further defined the contributions of key genes and proteins to the disease. The overview suggests new treatment approaches that could be tailored for each patient, as well as potential biologic targets for...
In a phase I/II trial reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Liu et al found that anti-CD19 chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) natural killer (NK) cells produced rapid responses in patients with CD19-positive lymphoid tumors, without the toxicities associated with CAR T-cell therapy in this...
Marcia Cruz-Correa, MD, PhD, Professor of Medicine at the University of Puerto Rico and Adjunct Professor of Surgical Oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, congratulated the investigators on the conduct of the PANGEA trial and the outcomes it achieved for patients. “When...
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), approximately 70% of deaths from cancer occur in low- and middle-income countries, where late-stage presentation and inaccessibility to diagnosis and treatment are common.1 In the sub-Saharan African country of Ethiopia, cancer is becoming an...
“They’re all charlatans,” my professor assured me when, in medical school in the mid-1970s, I expressed an interest in oncology. The treatment of cancer with drugs, despite popular but inaccurate descriptions of its history, began in 1944 when Goodman and Gilman at Yale conducted contract research...
Nicholas J. Short, MD, of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, received the 2019 Joanne Levy, MD, Memorial Award for Outstanding Achievement at the 2019 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition in Orlando. This annual award (which includes a...
This week, we’ll be featuring three researchers discussing findings presented at the 2020 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium: Dr. Scott Kopetz, of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, discusses quality-of-life results from the BEACON CRC trial in BRAF V600E–mutated colorectal cancer;...