A steady decline over more than 2 decades has resulted in a 25% drop in the overall cancer death rate in the United States. The drop equates to 2.1 million fewer cancer deaths between 1991 and 2014. The news comes from "Cancer Statistics, 2017," the American Cancer Society’s...
As more cost pressures are placed on the health-care system, and the transition to value-based care gains momentum, the Association of Community Cancer Centers’ (ACCC) 7th annual Trends in Cancer Programs survey revealed critical challenges and emerging trends in U.S. cancer programs. The...
New research from the University of Wisconsin (UW) Carbone Cancer Center has clarified the mechanisms involved in a common growth pathway implicated in many solid tumor types and could lead to better outcomes for patients with head and neck, lung, and triple-negative breast cancer,...
On January 4, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Priority Review status for the supplemental New Drug Application (sNDA) for regorafenib (Stivarga) tablets for the second-line systemic treatment of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma in the United States. “Liver cancer is ...
In a new study published by Jagsi et al in JAMA Surgery, nearly half of patients with early-stage breast cancer considered having double mastectomy, and one in six received it—including many who were at low risk of developing a second breast cancer. Many patients who chose double...
Venous thromboembolism is a serious—and sometimes fatal—complication of cancer and chemotherapy treatment. Since breast cancer is one of the most common cancers, it accounts for a large number of cancer-related cases of venous thromboembolism. Routine thromboprophylaxis, however, is not recommended ...
Twenty-five years ago, I was a physically fit woman of 45 in training to run a marathon, which had been a lifelong goal. I was feeling fine and had no hint of the illness that would nearly take my life and has forever changed it. While ramping up to go the 26.2-mile distance, I decided to have a...
R. Daniel Beauchamp, MD, Chair of the Section of Surgical Sciences and the John Clinton Foshee Distinguished Professor of Surgery at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, has been selected to receive the 2016 Dr. Rodman E. and Thomas G. Sheen Award from the New Jersey American College of Surgeons...
A study finding that there is no clear cutoff age to stop breast cancer screening has received national coverage in newspapers and CNN as well as in health and medical publications. “I am glad this is catching fire, because it really needs to be out there,” Cindy S. Lee, MD, the study’s lead...
An analysis of data from nearly 6 million screening mammograms found no evidence for a clear cutoff age to stop breast cancer screening. Screening mammography among women aged 75 years was associated with higher cancer detection and lower recall rates than among younger women in the study. These...
One of the featured “Big Debates” at the 2016 World Cancer Congress in Paris addressed this question: Are scarce resources best applied to prevention rather than treatment? Many experts do not see prevention vs treatment in such stark terms or even as a realistic scenario. It’s a false dichotomy,...
The prevalence of both cancer and cognitive impairment increases with age.1-3 Based upon Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER)-Medicare studies, it is estimated that 3% to 7% of patients with cancer aged ≥ 65 also suffer from dementia, although the true prevalence of dementia in this...
The 13th International Conference of the Society of Integrative Oncology (SIO) held in Miami, Florida, in November, drew its largest audience yet, with nearly 400 clinicians, researchers, patients, and patient advocates in integrative oncology care from 25 countries in attendance with large...
Press conference moderator Carlos L. Arteaga, MD, of Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, Nashville, Tennessee, said that buparlisib will probably not be clinically useful, partly because it crosses the blood-brain barrier , thus causing mood disorders, and is not an ideal phosphoinositide 3-kinase...
The pan-phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) inhibitor buparlisib combined with fulvestrant (Faslodex) prolonged progression-free survival compared with placebo and fulvestrant in postmenopausal women with hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative advanced breast cancer previously treated with an...
Myles Brown, MD, Director of the Center for Functional Cancer Epigenetics at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, suggested the failure of the endocrine therapy to increase the pathologic complete response rates “may be related to the fact that the aromatase inhibitor was not the optimal...
The addition of estrogen deprivation to neoadjuvant chemotherapy and HER2 blockade did not enhance the achievement of pathologic complete responses in women with early-stage breast cancer, according to the results of the NRG Oncology/NSABP B-52 trial reported at the 2016 San Antonio Breast Cancer...
Press conference moderator Carlos L. Arteaga, MD, said: “This drug is not necessarily the same as palbociclib [Ibrance] or ribociclib. There are subtle differences among these three [cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) 4/6] inhibitors. The tissue analysis provides us with an enormous opportunity to...
As neoadjuvant therapy, abemaciclib alone or in combination with anastrozole achieved strong signals of anticancer activity in postmenopausal patients with hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative breast cancer in the neoMONARCH phase II study.1 Abemaciclib alone or in combination with anastrozole...
Results of this trial have been anticipated for a long time. Women were enrolled between 2000 and 2008,” said Leif Ellisen, MD, PhD, Program Director of Breast Medical Oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center in Boston. Regarding the survival advantage in triple-negative...
Researchers working on whole-exome and transciptome sequencing of endocrine-resistant estrogen receptor–positive metastatic breast cancer have shown that the mutational landscape differs from that of estrogen receptor–positive primary breast cancer, and these differences have the potential to...
How can the results of this trial be applied to clinical practice? Press conference moderator, Virginia Kaklamani, MD, of the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, said: “The landscape has changed. Now we treat postmenopausal hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative metastatic...
The addition of everolimus (Afinitor) to fulvestrant (Faslodex) doubled progression-free survival in postmenopausal women with hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer resistant to aromatase inhibitor therapy compared with fulvestrant plus placebo, according to the...
On Tuesday, December 13, President Obama signed into law the 21st Century Cures Act, landmark legislation designed to improve and accelerate the pace of biomedical research in the United States. ASCO Chief Executive Officer Clifford Hudis, MD, FACP, FASCO, attended the White House signing ceremony ...
“This study shows that a great deal of innovation can come from existing knowledge. The 7+3 regimen has been around since I was an intern,” admitted Armand Keating, MD, of the University of Toronto and Princess Margaret Hospital, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. “Using the liposomal formulation of...
Induction therapy with the experimental chemotherapy called CPX-351—a liposomal formulation of cytarabine and daunorubicin—outperformed standard “7+3” cytarabine plus daunorubicin by extending survival in older high-risk patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) who subsequently underwent...
Mikkael A. Sekeres, MD, MS, Director of the Leukemia Program at the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Center in Ohio, commented on vadastuximab talirine in newly diagnosed acute myeloid leukemia (AML). He noted that the drug is similar to gemtuzumab ozogamicin, another antibody-drug conjugate that...
The investigational CD33-directed antibody-drug conjugate vadastuximab talirine yielded high overall and complete response rates when combined with standard “7+3” chemotherapy for patients newly diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.1 Results from this phase Ib study were presented at the 2016...
The following essay by Jeremy K. Hon, MD, is adapted from The Big Casino: America’s Best Cancer Doctors Share Their Most Powerful Stories, which was coedited by Stan Winokur, MD, and Vincent Coppola and published in May 2014. The book is available on Amazon.com and thebigcasino.org. As physicians, ...
“This study is important because R-CHOP [rituximab and cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, vincristine, prednisone] has been the standard of care for many years. CHOP, the chemotherapy backbone, has withstood challenges from more aggressive regimens in the past. The excellent clinical outcomes observed ...
Monica M. Bertagnolli, MD, a long-time ASCO member and volunteer, has been elected to serve as the 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...
Despite the fact that 28 states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws to permit the use of cannabis and cannabinoid-based drugs to treat medical conditions, including cancer and symptoms from its treatment, federal law prohibits physicians from prescribing marijuana to their patients,...
Long-awaited results of the Cancer and Leukemia Group B (CALGB)/Alliance 50303 trial were a disappointment to many hematologists/oncologists at the 2016 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition. The study failed to show that dose-adjusted EPOCH-R (etoposide,...
W.K. Alfred Yung, MD, has wanted a career in medicine since he was a high-school student and has spent nearly 4 decades fulfilling that dream, specifically in the research and treatment of one of the deadliest cancers, malignant brain tumor, especially glioblastoma multiforme, the most common...
Speaking about the GALLIUM study in the ASH News Daily, Brad S. Kahl, MD, of Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, commented, “It is a potentially practice-changing study that clearly shows an 8% absolute improvement in progression-free survival at 2 years for the patients getting...
Induction and maintenance therapies with obinutuzumab (Gazyva) were superior to rituximab (Rituxan) induction and maintenance in patients with untreated follicular lymphoma, according to results of the phase III GALLIUM study presented at the Plenary Session during the 58th American Society of...
In a study reported in Nature Genetics, Bishoy M. Faltas, MD, of Weill Cornell Medicine, and colleagues identified factors in the clonal evolution of chemotherapy-resistant urothelial carcinoma.1 As stated by the investigators: “Chemotherapy-resistant urothelial carcinoma has no uniformly curative...
Women with hormone receptor–positive metastatic breast cancer are witnessing an unprecedented time of success in the battle against their disease. Just in the past 12 months, a number of prospective, randomized, phase III studies were reported, with positive results indicating the value of...
Sergio A. Giralt, MD, Chief of the Adult Bone Marrow Transplant Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, and the Melvin Berlin Family Chair in Multiple Myeloma, commented on the findings of the StaMINA trial for The ASCO Post. He said the results of the largest randomized U.S....
Additional interventions following upfront autologous stem cell transplant in multiple myeloma did not further improve progression-free or overall survival over transplant alone in a multicenter study presented as a late-breaking abstract at the 2016 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual...
“In the past few years, there has been increased reporting of other, less traditional, response criteria in acute myeloid leukemia (AML), including morphologic leukemia-free state, partial response, and complete remission [or complete response] with incomplete recovery. There is some concern that...
There has been no better time than the present for women in the field of oncology: Women at all stages of their careers are finding more opportunities and avenues to excel. At the time of the last ASCO workforce survey, women made up 28.4% of the oncologist workforce, and that proportion is rising...
The importance of achieving complete response after intensive therapy in older adults with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) was confirmed in a follow-up analysis of the E2906 North American Intergroup trial.1 Patients in complete response had superior survival in this landmark analysis. This finding...
Tyrosine kinase inhibitors, such as imatinib, nilotinib (Tasigna), and dasatinib (Sprycel), have revolutionized the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). A substantial percentage of patients achieve deep and meaningful remissions on these agents. More recently, partly driven by patients’ and ...
The diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer have long been a source of controversy among the oncology community, the political sector, and patient advocacy groups. Most notably, the decision to biopsy a man’s prostate gland rests largely on his prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test numbers, the...
Although a cure for cancer remains elusive, there are many promising ideas to eradicate this disease, including the Cancer Moonshot Initiative and an ever-increasing body of cancer research that continually drives innovative treatments in an effort to improve survival and, ultimately, find a...
Michael Gnant, MD, Professor of Surgery at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria and President of the Austrian Breast & Colorectal Cancer Study Group, was the invited discussant of the three studies of extended endocrine therapy. “The trials did not reach the necessary statistical levels ...
A routine blood test may predict how long patients with cancer in palliative care will survive, researchers reported at the ESMO Asia 2016 Congress in Singapore. “Cancer patients in palliative care want honest and accurate prognostic information but this information needs to be shared...
A brain-boosting protein plays an important role in how well people respond to chemotherapy, researchers reported at the ESMO Asia 2016 Congress in Singapore. A study (Abstract 497O_PR) found that patients with cancer suffering from depression have decreased amounts of brain-derived neurotrophic...
The first data on rare sarcomas in Asian patients were presented in three studies at the ESMO Asia 2016 Congress in Singapore. Just half of patients with advanced angiosarcoma received chemotherapy, although it improved overall survival. CIC-rearranged sarcomas were associated with a much worse...