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Showing 9501 - 9550Selected Abstracts From 2015 ASH Annual Meeting: Part 4
Here is the final installment of selected abstracts from the proceedings of the 2015 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition, focusing on Hodgkin lymphoma, follicular lymphoma, diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, and chronic lymphocytic leukemia. For other selected abstracts...
Providing Perspective on Pressing Economic Issues Facing Cancer Care—Now and in the Future
CANCERSCAPE, the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Association of Community Cancer Centers (ACCC), provided a forum for about 300 attendees to gain insight into the complexities of oncology treatment, where “clinical advances, policy mandates, and value-based payment reform intersect.” Of particular...
ASCO Pledges to Advance Interoperability Among Health Information Systems
ASCO has joined members of the health-care community in pledging to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to commit to principles that will advance interoperability among health information systems. A formal announcement of the initiative was delivered by HHS Secretary Sylvia M....
Understanding and Preparing for MACRA
The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) was passed in April 2015, introducing comprehensive changes to how Medicare pays physicians for services. As the policies passed in MACRA are rolled out over the coming years, they will profoundly impact reimbursement and care...
MicroRNA miR-181a Reduces NFκB Signaling in Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphomas
A recent study by researchers at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine showed that a microRNA called miR-181a dampens signals from the cancer-driving NFκB protein pathway in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL). By reducing NFκB...
NCI Announces Blue Ribbon Panel to Help Guide Vice President Biden’s National Cancer Moonshot Initiative
On April 4, 2016, The National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), announced a Blue Ribbon Panel of scientific experts, cancer leaders, and patient advocates that will inform the scientific direction and goals at NCI of Vice President Joe Biden’s National...
New Commission on Cancer Standards Clarifies and Emphasizes Process, Quality, Data Reporting, and More
The 2016 edition of the Commission on Cancer’s accreditation standards manual clarifies and provides additional information in many areas and raises the bar for compliance in some, including psychosocial distress screening, survivorship care, data reporting, and activities in prevention and...
Outcome Measures in Quality and Identifying High-Quality Practice
At this year’s ASCO Quality Care Symposium, Craig Earle, MD, MSc, of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, used Donabedian’s Triad—structure, process, and outcome—to set the stage for his presentation on the science of quality. “The theory behind Donabedian’s Triad is that structure...
Experts Consider What It Means to Improve Quality of Care in an Era of Increasing Reliance on Targeted Therapies
Precision medicine is judged according to different values across the multiple stakeholders involved in cancer care. At this year’s Quality Care Symposium, presenters from different sectors of oncology addressed a central question: How do we assess quality in the age of precision medicine?1,2 Right ...
Metastatic Breast Cancer With Discordant Tumors: Small Study Reports Treatment by Primary Status May Improve Survival
In a small retrospective series, patients with metastatic breast cancer treated according to the receptor status of the primary tumor, not the metastatic one, had significantly longer median overall survival. The study was reported at the 2016 Miami Breast Cancer Conference by T. Allen Pannell, Jr, ...
Jeffrey Fowler, MD, Begins Presidency of Society of Gynecologic Oncology
Jeffrey Fowler, MD, John G. Boutselis Chair in Gynecologic Oncology and Professor and Vice-Chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, started his 1-year term as the 48th President of the Society of Gynecologic Oncology (SGO) at the conclusion of the...
Breast Cancer Vaccines Moving Forward at a Fast Clip
Vaccines for both secondary and primary prevention of breast cancer are showing potential in clinical trials, according to Elizabeth A. Mittendorf, MD, PhD, who is leading much of the vaccine research at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston. Vaccine platforms being explored...
Expert Point of View: Kathleen Moore, MD
Session moderator Kathleen Moore, MD, Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine, Oklahoma City, said that while the response rates are “not incredibly high,” trabectedin offers another line of therapy where there previously was none. “I think ...
Trabectedin Improves Progression-Free Survival in Uterine Leiomyosarcoma
In women with uterine leiomyosarcoma, trabectedin (Yondelis), a novel cytotoxic agent, significantly improved progression-free survival, compared with dacarbazine (4.2 vs 1.5 months, hazard ratio [HR] = 0.55, P < .001). According to the study’s authors, a lack of cumulative toxicity allows...
Computer-Assisted Decision Support in Medical Oncology: We Need It Now
Today’s medical oncologist is increasingly challenged to stay current with the latest developments in cancer treatment. I have been fortunate to speak with many oncologists over the past quarter-century on how professional life has evolved since the 1990s. These conversations have left me with a...
Throwing Out the Baby With the Bathwater: A Critical Appraisal of the USPSTF Recommendation Against Screening for Prostate Cancer
In 2012, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) issued a recommendation against routine screening for prostate cancer.1,2 The grade D recommendation was considered controversial at the time, and remains so now, because many stakeholders have weighed the same body of evidence and come to...
ENDO 2016: Engineered Ovary Implant Restores Fertility in Mice
Northwestern University scientists used a three-dimensional (3D) printer to create a prosthetic ovary—an implant that allowed mice that had their ovaries surgically removed to bear live young. The results were presented by Laronda et al on Saturday, April 2, at the Endocrine Society's Annual...
ENDO 2016: BPA Changes Fetal Development of the Mammary Gland, Can Raise Breast Cancer Risk
A new culture system that tests the role of chemical exposure on the developing mammary gland has found that bisphenol A (BPA) directly affects the mammary gland of mouse embryos. The study results, presented by Speroni et al Friday, April 1, at the Endocrine Society's Annual Meeting in Boston...
PET Probe [18F]CFA Detects Deoxycytidine Kinase Activity, May Lead to New Ways to Improve Response to Treatment
A promising new discovery by University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) scientists could lead to a new method of identifying cancer patients whose disease expresses high levels of an enzyme and who are more likely to respond to particular treatments. Their findings were published by Kim et al in...
Therapeutic Combinations May Prevent Resistance to CDK4/6 Inhibition in Estrogen Receptor–Positive Breast Cancer
In preclinical studies, breast cancer cells became resistant to therapeutics targeting CDK4/6, such as palbociclib (Ibrance), in multiple ways. According to the research published by Herrera-Abreu et al in Cancer Research, different combinations of therapeutics might prevent and overcome the...
Meta-analysis of Gene-Expression Datasets Identifies Novel Five-Gene Pancreatic Cancer Classifier
Pancreatic cancer is often diagnosed at a late stage, when curative treatment is no longer possible. A team led by investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) identified and validated an accurate five-gene classifier for discriminating early pancreatic cancer from nonmalignant...
MRI-Guided Adaptive Reoptimization in Radiotherapy Shows Promise in Urinary Bladder Cancer Treatment
A new radiotherapy technique could help doctors to focus treatment more precisely on tumors in the bladder and reduce damage to surrounding healthy tissue. Researchers showed that pretreatment imaging using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was effective at guiding radiotherapy toward tumors in the...
Microneedle Patch Delivers Localized Anti–PD-1 Antibody Immunotherapy to Melanoma in Preclinical Models
Biomedical engineering researchers at North Carolina State University (NC State) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC Chapel Hill) have developed a technique that uses a patch embedded with microneedles to deliver cancer immunotherapy treatment directly to the site of melanoma....
Minimal Residual Disease in AML: Worth Looking?
As summarized in this issue of The ASCO Post, Ivey and colleagues demonstrated that assessing for NPM1-mutated gene transcripts by reverse-transcriptase quantitative polymerase chain reaction assay is a feasible approach for measuring minimal residual disease after acute myeloid leukemia (AML)...
Quality Improvement Projects Aim at Reducing Errors in Prescribing IV and Oral Chemotherapy
Two quality improvement projects described in the Journal of Oncology Practice resulted in reduced errors in prescribing intravenous (IV) and oral chemotherapy. A project at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston outpatient infusion centers first identified 15 different types of...
High Rate of Overuse of Serum Tumor Marker Testing
A retrospective review to evaluate the frequency of serum tumor marker testing “found a high rate of serum tumor marker testing overuse and extreme overuse in patients with advanced solid tumors,” Melissa K. Accordino, MD, of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York,...
Long Noncoding RNA SAMMSON Linked to Malignant Melanoma
In collaboration with researchers from Ghent University, Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie (VIB) scientists from the University of Leuven have revealed a remarkable link between malignant melanoma and a noncoding RNA gene called SAMMSON. The SAMMSON gene is specifically expressed in human...
Unique Fellowship Aims to Lessen Global Cancer Burden by Training Foreign Medical Graduates in Surgical Oncology
Many low- and middle-income countries do not have a defined medical specialty in surgical oncology, and lack an educational infrastructure to respond to the local burden of cancer, but a Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) fellowship is succeeding in addressing this problem by training...
Study Explores Genomic and Transcriptomic Features of Anti–PD-1 Resistance in Advanced Melanoma
Immunotherapy using anti–programmed cell death 1 (PD-1) antibodies has revolutionized the treatment of advanced melanoma and a growing list of other cancers. But 60% to 70% of melanoma tumors are resistant to anti–PD-1 antibodies, and there is an urgent need to understand how to...
ASCO Issues Report on State of Cancer Care in America: 2016
The State of Cancer Care in America: 2016, published online in the Journal of Oncology Practice1 and presented earlier this month at a Congressional briefing in Washington, DC, is ASCO’s third annual assessment of national trends in cancer care delivery. The report highlights many promising cancer...
Fecal Immunochemical Test Highly Sensitive and Effective When Used for Colorectal Cancer Annual Screening Programs
Annual screening with the fecal immunochemical test is highly sensitive for detecting colorectal cancer and “is feasible and effective for population-level colorectal cancer screening,” according to a large-scale retrospective cohort study assessing this test over four rounds of annual screening....
I Never Forget I Have Cancer
I have a history of fibrocystic breasts, which required biopsies to make certain the cysts were benign, and for years they were. But in 2009, my mammogram screening picked up a suspicious lump in my right breast, which turned out to be stage III estrogen receptor–positive/progesterone...
Somebody’s Watching You: Meet the Tweet Trackers of the Social Oncology Project
In a one-story concrete industrial building across the street from a lumberyard in Austin, Texas, Greg Matthews and his computers are tracking everything that more than 500,000 U.S.-based physicians post publicly on social media. Every tweet. Every public blog, Facebook, or Instagram post. Every...
Expect Questions and Heightened Interest About Bilateral Mastectomy
Recently released data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) showed that the rate of mastectomies increased between 2005 and 2013, with much of that increase attributed to bilateral mastectomies among women with early-stage cancer in one breast opting for bilateral...
The Perplexing Increase in Bilateral Mastectomies
The increased rate of bilateral mastectomies, as shown in recently released data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), is “perplexing,” Ismail Jatoi, MD, PhD, told The ASCO Post. “We are seeing more and more women with unilateral breast cancer opt for bilateral mastectomy,...
A Cancer Patient’s Harried Survivorship Story
There are approximately 14 million cancer survivors in the United States, a number that is steadily increasing, thanks to our advances in detection and treatment. However, surviving cancer can leave a host of physical, emotional, and financial hardships for years after diagnosis and treatment. In ...
A Hard Look at the Connection Between Germs and Mental Illness
The relationship between disease and microbes was first proposed in the 17th century, but the basic standards for proving that infection causes disease were not laid down until 1883, when the German bacteriologists Robert Koch and Friedrich Loeffler provided the first evidence of the processes...
A Doctor’s Prescription for a Long Life
Longevity is a common goal among humans. And like all things human, it is not distributed equally. According to world health data, Japan is number one on the longevity list; its 130 million citizens have a life expectancy of about 84.74 years. The sub-Saharan country of Chad is number 224, having ...
A Gene Hunter’s Advice on How to Take Control of Your Genetic Inheritance
Since the late 1970s, researchers have identified several gene mutations that are implicated in cancer. Many of these mutations are acquired during our lifetime, but, as we know, some are inherited in families. Identifying heritable cancer-causing genetic mutations is a double-edged sword,...
A Drop of Blood
I was a third-year internal medicine resident, rotating through the oncology service, when I was asked to perform my first circumcision. My team was rounding on Tom, a 52-year-old gentleman currently receiving third-line treatment for metastatic esophageal cancer; we were discussing at length his...
A Fight to Remember
In 2006, one of my close friends, Robert O’Connor, won the mayoral race for my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Everyone loved Robert, affectionately known as “Bob” and often referred to as “The People’s Mayor.” Bob was “Mr. Pittsburgh,” and it was his promise to reverse the city’s...
Benefiting From Mind-Body Therapy
My diagnosis of early-stage breast cancer at age 35 was a shock, also because I come from a family with no history of cancer. In disbelief, I was literally speechless—I lost my voice completely for several days. I grew up in the former Soviet Union and then in the newly independent Kyrgyzstan. My...
‘Know Your Tumor’ Program Aids Patients With Pancreatic Cancer
Patients with pancreatic cancer can obtain molecular tumor profiling through the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network’s Know Your TumorSM precision medicine initiative, a partnership with Perthera, a personalized medicine service company that facilitates the multi-omic profiling and generates the...
The Time Is Now for the Worldwide Cancer Community to Be Proactive
The ASCO Post recently spoke with nationally recognized surgical oncologist Chandrakanth Are, MBBS, MBA, FRCS, FACS, Jerald L & Carolynn J. Varner Professor of Surgical Oncology & Global Health; Vice Chair of Education; and Program Director, General Surgery Residency, University of Nebraska ...
New High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound Advances Treatment for Prostate Cancer
For the estimated 220,000 men who will be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year, deciding on a method of treatment can be a challenge. Some with early-stage cancer pursue active surveillance, while others with more severe cancer immediately pursue surgery, including prostatectomy. Others fall...
Biomarkers in Prostate Cancer: PARP Inhibitors and Defects in DNA Repair
New data on molecular biomarkers in advanced prostate cancer are accumulating at a fast pace. The studies in this area can now be broadly grouped in two distinct areas—those that broadly relate to androgen signaling and those that relate to DNA-repair pathways. The Androgen-Signaling Pathway With...
Minimal Residual Disease Identified by NPM1 Mutation Is a Powerful Marker for Poorer Outcome in Standard-Risk AML
In a study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Adam Ivey, MSc, from Guy’s Hospital, London, and colleagues found that a leukemia-specific marker consisting of mutation in the gene encoding nucleophosmin (NPM1) can be used to identify minimal residual disease in peripheral blood in...
Introduction of New Diagnostic Devices in Oncology: New Is Not Necessarily Better
“New!” “Improved!” “Throw out that old [fill in the blank] and go buy a new [fill in the blank]!” Sound familiar? The key to marketing is to convince customers that they need a product without which they had previously been quite happy. All too often, this strategy is accompanied by a caveat emptor ...
How Rehabilitation Services Provide Benefit for Patients With Spinal Metastases
The benefits of rehabilitation in traumatic spinal injuries are well established. Recently, studies have shown similarly positive results in cancer-related spinal injuries, indicating that rehabilitation can play a complementary role in the care management of this patient population....
Modified CAR T Cells Overcome Immune Suppression, Effective Against Solid Tumors in Preclinical Models
Adding a genetically engineered “switch receptor” to second-generation CAR T cells blocked PD-1–mediated immune suppression, and made the immunotherapy effective against solid tumors in preclinical models, according to a study published by Liu et al in Cancer Research....
