In October 2015, ASCO launched the Health Policy Fellowship program to help the next generation of oncologists with an interest in health policy to develop the skills and experience necessary to achieve their goals and shape cancer care policy in an increasingly complicated and diverse care...
Telehealth is the delivery of health care remotely via telecommunication tools. Its aim is to increase access to care, especially for patients with chronic diseases such as cancer and for populations for whom care is not always available. With the growing availability of broadband and portable...
Pamela Laszewski, RN, OCN, Clinical Leader of Radiation at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, will receive the notable 2017 Oncology Nursing Society (ONS) Excellence in Radiation Therapy Nursing Award during the Annual ONS Congress May 4–7, 2017, in Denver. The award was created to...
Born and reared in Anchorage, a city located in Southcentral Alaska, farther north than St. Petersburg, Russia, Jennifer Lycette, MD, grew up during the 1970s and 1980s. “We were fairly isolated from the lower 48. We didn’t have cable TV in Anchorage, and I remember my father would turn off the TV ...
The statistics on the rising rates of skin cancer are alarming. According to the Skin Cancer Foundation, each year over 5.4 million cases of nonmelanoma skin cancer are treated in more than 3.3 million people, and an additional 76,380 people are diagnosed with the deadliest form of skin cancer,...
Kanti R. Rai, MD, Professor of Medicine, Hofstra Northwell School of Medicine, New Hyde Park, New York, commented on these study findings. “I congratulate the investigators for a work done with discipline, excellent collaboration, and speed.” “All of us who have become familiar with ibrutinib...
Currently, there is no U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved therapy for chronic graft-vs-host disease—a life-threatening consequence of stem cell or bone marrow transplant—that has not responded to corticosteroids, but this may be about to change. Ibrutinib (Imbruvica) achieved...
While evidence is mounting on the physical and emotional challenges many cancer caregivers experience, few studies have addressed the experience of partners of young adults with cancer. Now, a new study evaluating the psychosocial concerns and mental health in the partners of young survivors of...
The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) is pleased to announce that the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has awarded the organization a 5-year, $1.125 million grant to continue providing clinical fellow and junior faculty clinical researchers the opportunity to learn the essentials of...
“As a medical student, I often felt marginalized from my medical community. I have been told that my name is ‘not American,’ fallen prey to being confused for support staff such as a janitor (even while wearing my white coat) and been asked questions like, ‘Where are you really from?’ or ‘How old...
Vanderbilt University School of Nursing Assistant Professor Jie Deng, PhD, RN, has been awarded a $789,000 research scholar grant by the American Cancer Society to develop and test a self-care program for head and neck cancer survivors diagnosed with secondary lymphedema/fibrosis....
ASCO’s State Affiliate Council serves as an advisory group to ASCO’s Board of Directors on issues relating to its State/Regional Affiliates and their members, and serves as a vehicle for effective communications between the Board and domestic membership. The Council is made up of physician...
JCO Clinical Care Informatics (JCO CCI) will be the first ASCO journal devoted to applications of biomedical informatics to cancer care. Debra Patt, MD, MPH, MBA, the Editor-in-Chief of JCO CCI, understands how important biomedical informatics research is to the oncology field. Dr. Patt coauthored ...
ASCO has launched a new journal dedicated to precision oncology, JCO Precision Oncology (JCO PO). JCO PO features original clinical research, scientific reviews, and editorials on genomics. James M. Ford, MD, the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, said JCO PO offers precision oncologists a place to...
Although, in the past, patients with cancer were often counseled by their physicians to rest and reduce their physical activity, according to the American Cancer Society, emerging data are showing that exercise is not only safe and possible during cancer treatment, it can improve patients’...
Monica M. Bertagnolli, MD, a long-time member and volunteer, has been elected to serve as President of ASCO for the term beginning in June 2018. She will take office as President-Elect during the ASCO Annual Meeting in Chicago in June 2017. Additionally, three new members were elected to the ASCO...
What if more patients with lung cancer could benefit from immunotherapy? Although progress in this area of research is exciting, unfortunately, a vast majority of patients with thoracic malignancies do not respond to this pioneering form of treatment. Vamsidhar Velcheti, MD, Assistant Professor of ...
On December 16, a set of joint guidelines developed by ASCO, the Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP), and the College of American Pathologists (CAP) on standardizing the interpretation and reporting of sequence variants in cancer was published online, ahead of the January print issue of The...
The first phase III trial of an inhibitor of poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) yielded unprecedented results in treating ovarian cancer. The trial was presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Copenhagen, Denmark, and electronically reported concurrently in The New England ...
According to the American Cancer Society, in the United States, thyroid cancer is the most rapidly increasing cancer, tripling in the past 3 decades, and is commonly diagnosed at a younger age than most other adult cancers. A study by Blackburn et al examining whether survivors of thyroid cancer...
New York University (NYU) Langone Medical Center has announced that surgeon and scientist Diane M. Simeone, MD, will join its Perlmutter Cancer Center on March 1, 2017, to serve as Associate Director for Translational Research and to lead its newly established Pancreatic Cancer Center. Currently...
The field of epigenetics emerged in the 1990s and has been described with somewhat variable meanings. In 2008, a meeting at the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory arrived at a definition of epigenetics by consensus: “A stably heritable phenotype resulting from changes in a chromosome without...
UMass Memorial Medical Center and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have notified the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission that UMass Memorial Medical Center intends to become the first academic medical center to join the Dana-Farber Cancer Care Collaborative. The agreement, for adult medical oncology ...
Sir Donald Munger: “You have been on holiday, I understand. Relaxing, I hope?” James Bond: “Oh, hardly relaxing, but most satisfying.” (Diamonds Are Forever) As tyrosine kinase inhibitors became the mainstay of therapy for patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), our assumption has been that...
In older patients, a current or previous cancer diagnosis confers a 15% to 20% greater risk of suffering a fall.1 Defined as an “unexpected event in which the participant comes to rest on the ground, floor, or lower level,” a fall occurs in 30% to 50% of cancer patients 65 years of age or...
Most patients with squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck present with locally advanced disease. With combined-modality approaches, the chance of cure ranges from < 50% to up to 80%, depending on the site, stage, and other risk factors, such as human papillomavirus (HPV) status. When...
An ASCO Special Article in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Sulman et al,1 reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post, issued ASCO’s endorsement of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) guidelines on radiation therapy for adult patients diagnosed with glioblastoma. It is a positive...
As reported by Erik P. Sulman, MD, PhD, of MD Anderson Cancer Center, and colleagues in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, ASCO has endorsed the 2016 American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) evidence-based guideline on radiation therapy for glioblastoma.1 The endorsement was based on review ...
Ensuring that people with cancer understand how cancer treatment could affect their fertility and what options are available for preserving fertility were widely recognized as top priorities by attendees of the 2016 Oncofertility Conference in Chicago. As detailed at the conference, means of...
“One of the most challenging oncologic situations that I face as a clinician is the diagnosis of breast cancer in a young pregnant patient,” Jacqueline Jeruss, MD, PhD, Director of the Breast Care Center at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, Ann Arbor, told the more than 250...
Anas Younes, MD, Chief of the Lymphoma Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, commented on the brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris)/nivolumab (Opdivo) combination studies, noting that complete response rates of 60% are “impressive.” “It seems that in the pretransplant setting, the...
Response rates of 90% to 100% were achieved in early studies evaluating the combination of brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris) and nivolumab (Opdivo) in relapsed or refractory classical Hodgkin lymphoma. The findings were presented at the 2016 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting &...
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy continues to have impressive showings in patients with aggressive hematologic malignancies and no other good treatment options. Interim results of the pivotal phase II ZUMA-1 trial, the first multicenter trial of the experimental CAR T-cell therapy...
The ASCO Post asked Philip McCarthy, MD, Professor of Oncology and Internal Medicine at Roswell Park Cancer, Buffalo, and Director of the Blood and Marrow Transplant Center there, to comment on these study findings. He first addressed the need to study earlier intervention for smoldering ...
High-risk patients with smoldering multiple myeloma responded to a regimen of elotuzumab (Empliciti), lenalidomide (Revlimid), and dexamethasone, in a multicenter phase II study led by Irene Ghobrial, MD, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston.1 “The high response rates among this patient...
Sara Hurvitz, MD, Director of the Breast Oncology Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, commented that in the United States, a bone mineral density test can help identify candidates for bone-modifying agents. “We look at women who are going on...
Addition of the oral bisphosphonate ibandronate to endocrine therapy did not significantly improve disease-free survival in patients with early breast cancer, according to the first results from the Dutch TEAM IIb trial presented at the 2016 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.1 The results were...
At the 2016 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, a group of breast cancer experts made a case for using the 21-gene Oncotype DX Breast Recurrence Score Assay in node-positive patients, despite ASCO’s latest recommendations to restrict it to node-negative estrogen receptor–positive patients. The...
Each year, The ASCO Post asks Jame Abraham, MD, Director of the Breast Oncology Program at Taussig Cancer Institute and Co-Director of the Cleveland Clinic Comprehensive Breast Cancer Program, to give his picks for the most important research presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium....
Presentation of the PERTAIN study data by lead author Grazia Arpino, MD, PhD, was met with high interest at the 2016 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. Steven Vogl, MD, of the Bronx, New York, commented, “This is a very complicated study for me, but it seems that at least half your patients got...
A team of researchers at Fox Chase Cancer Center found that, despite the recommendation of screening guidelines, less than half of adults younger than 50 years old who have colorectal cancer are being screened for Lynch syndrome, a genetic anomaly that increases the risk of colorectal and several...
Howard A. “Skip” Burris, MD, President of Clinical Operations and Chief Medical Officer at Sarah Cannon Research Institute, Nashville, commented on the poster presentation for The ASCO Post. He said the results “fit the whole paradigm” that is desired for triple-negative breast cancer, which is to ...
The antibody-drug conjugate sacituzumab govitecan (IMMU-132) produced high objective response rates, many of them quite durable, in a multicenter study of heavily pretreated patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer, presented at the 2016 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.1 Trop-2 is ...
“Osimertinib (Tagrisso) has good penetration of the blood-brain barrier and showed high efficacy in patients with central nervous system (CNS) disease,” noted Tetsuya Mitsudomi, MD, Professor in the Division of Thoracic Surgery at Kindai University Faculty of Medicine in Osaka-Sayama, Japan....
We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you’d need infinite precision in order to predict future events. —Nassim Nicholas Taleb The term “precision oncology” is used to describe diverse strategies in cancer medicine ranging from the use of targeted therapies...
Precision medicine has advanced to the point where it can now impact the care of a majority of children with brain tumors, a new study by investigators at Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and Blood Disorders Center suggests. In the largest clinical study to date of genetic abnormalities in...
Cancer cells often delete genes that normally suppress tumor formation. These deletions also may extend to neighboring genes, an event known as “collateral lethality,” which may create new options for development of therapies for several cancers. Scientists at The University of Texas MD ...
“These results are interesting, important, and relevant for maintenance post chemotherapy, but if we are not using chemotherapy, they may not be relevant,” said Richard Furman, MD, of Weill Cornell Medical College, New York Presbyterian Hospital, New York. He said that newer drugs such as...
While momentum around immunotherapies for cancer continues to build, the high cost of these therapies places them at the center of debate about how best to define and measure value in cancer care. As these therapies are increasingly integrated into practice, all stakeholders—providers,...
Phase I clinical trial data published by Moulder-Thompson et al in Clinical Cancer Research reported that the investigational anticancer agent tucatinib (formerly ONT-380) showed 'notable activity' in the treatment of HER2-positive breast cancer with . The 50 women treated had disease...