When the COVID-19 pandemic limited in-person medical checkups last year, Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center offered video visits for the first time for long-term follow-up appointments for childhood cancer survivors. Due to the pandemic, virtual visits were adopted...
Giuseppe Curigliano, MD, PhD, of the University of Milan and Istituto Europeo Oncologico, talks about designing public health measures focused on COVID-19 morbidity and mortality for cancer patients, defining treatment and vaccine priorities, and creating a model to assess the impact of control...
Antoni Ribas, MD, PhD, of the University of California, Los Angeles and Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, and President of the American Association for Cancer Research, talks about why the meeting was held, how the coronavirus has affected cancer care and will impact long-term survivorship, as...
Recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Fast Track designation to a novel immunotherapy for the treatment of ovarian cancer as well as Breakthrough Therapy designation to treatments for HRAS-mutant head and neck squamous cell carcinoma and previously treated thyroid cancer....
A new report from Italy published by Toss et al in ESMO Open noted an increase in diagnoses of node-positive and stage III breast cancer after a 2-month interruption in breast cancer screening due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings support recommendations for a quick restoration of breast...
In the pivotal phase II KarMMa study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Nikhil C. Munshi, MD, and colleagues found that the B-cell maturation antigen–directed chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy idecabtagene vicleucel produced high response rates in patients with...
Type I collagen produced by cancer-associated fibroblasts may not promote cancer development, but instead, may play a protective role in controlling pancreatic cancer progression. This new understanding supports novel therapeutic approaches that bolster collagen rather than suppress it, according...
A study by Salerno et al published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention investigating the association of a cancer diagnosis and poor ambulatory function of survivors and subsequent mortality has found that cancer survivors with poor ambulatory function had a two to three times...
In a study reported in JCO Oncology Practice, Zhao et al found that 5-year adherence to adjuvant hormonal therapy was low among commercially insured women with breast cancer in the United States. The retrospective observational study used data from the IBM MarketScan Research Databases to identify...
Few studies documenting the benefit of neoadjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer have been conducted in minority populations. A single-institution study reported at PER's Miami Breast Cancer Conference, held virtually this year, confirmed that neoadjuvant chemotherapy improved axillary disease in...
Researchers have created a new technique that may help to uncover mechanisms cancer cells use to evade immunotherapies, which could lead to the development of more effective treatments. Investigators tested their new technique with cancer cells and matching immune cells from patients with melanoma...
In an Indian study reported in the British Medical Journal, Mittra et al found that breast cancer screening with clinical breast examination vs active surveillance resulted in younger age and significant downstaging of disease at diagnosis of breast cancer, a significant reduction in breast cancer...
Final analysis of a collaborative intergroup study confirmed the efficacy of adjuvant treatment with imatinib in patients with localized gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) in terms of prolonged relapse-free survival. In the high-risk subgroup, there was a trend toward a better long-term imatinib ...
In a Canadian population-based cohort study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Raphael et al found that survivors of testicular cancer were more likely to use mental health services in both the short and long term following treatment compared with the general population. Study Details...
“Cancer Alley,” located in Louisiana along the lower Mississippi River, serves as an industrial hub, with nearly 150 oil refineries, plastics plants, and chemical facilities. The ever-widening corridor of petrochemical plants has not only polluted the surrounding water and air, but also subjected...
On March 3, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted regular approval to lorlatinib (Lorbrena) for patients with metastatic non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) whose tumors are anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK)-positive, as detected by an FDA-approved test. The FDA also approved the...
A specific type of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) that contains a rearrangement in the MLL gene (also known as KMT2A) might be made more sensitive to chemotherapy using an antibiotic currently available to treat diarrhea, according to new research published by Zeisig et al in Science Translational...
In a new study published by Merritt et al in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, researchers demonstrated that sex hormones and insulin growth factors may be associated with recurrence risk in patients with endometrial cancer. The findings suggest endocrine-targeted therapies and an...
Regular mammography screening substantially reduces the risk of dying from breast cancer, according to a large study of over half a million women published by Stephen W. Duffy, MSc, and colleagues in the journal Radiology. Researchers said women who skipped even one scheduled mammography screening...
In the phase II TRANSFORMER trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Denmeade et al found no difference in progression-free survival with bipolar androgen therapy—defined as rapid cycling between high and low serum testosterone—vs enzalutamide in men with metastatic castration-resistant...
As reported in a letter to the editor in The New England Journal of Medicine by Elise A. Chong, MD, and colleagues, long-term follow-up of a single-center trial of tisagenlecleucel showed maintained responses in a high proportion of patients with relapsed or refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma ...
In a Canadian single-center phase II feasibility study reported in The Lancet Oncology, Cho et al found that a treatment protocol (surgery for mesothelioma after radiotherapy, also known as SMART) consisting of hemithoracic intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) followed by extrapleural...
On March 1, Merck announced the company is voluntarily withdrawing the U.S. indication for pembrolizumab (Keytruda) for the treatment of patients with metastatic small cell lung cancer with disease progression on or after platinum-based chemotherapy and at least one other prior line of therapy. The ...
Patients with lymphoma hospitalized for severe COVID-19 infection were at higher risk for prolonged hospital stay and death if they were treated with B-cell–depleting therapies (eg, rituximab, obinutuzumab) within the previous 12 months. The risk of persistent COVID-19 infection was also higher in...
Although guidelines exist for the use of several clinical prediction models based on logistic regression to help estimate the risk of lung cancer before treatment decision-making, they almost all focus on solitary pulmonary nodules, and have not shown accuracy in predicting malignancy in multiple...
In 2020, ASCO established the Steering Group on Cancer Care Delivery and Research in a Post-Pandemic Environment to evaluate the changes made in oncology care delivery, clinical research, and regulatory oversight in response to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as to make recommendations on how to...
In the phase II SWOG 1500 study reported in The Lancet, Pal et al found that among three comparator MET kinase inhibitors, cabozantinib prolonged progression-free survival vs sunitinib in metastatic papillary renal cell carcinoma. Study Details In the open-label trial, 147 eligible patients from...
At the 2021 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium, Motzer et al presented the clinical results of the CLEAR trial, adding a novel regimen, lenvatinib plus pembrolizu-mab, to the growing armamentarium of first-line treatments for patients with metastatic clear cell renal cell carcinoma (RCC). The...
On February 27, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an emergency use authorization (EUA) for the third vaccine for the prevention of COVID-19. The EUA allows the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine to be distributed in the United States for use in individuals 18 years of age and older. The FDA...
On February 26, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted accelerated approval to melphalan flufenamide (Pepaxto) in combination with dexamethasone for adult patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma who have received at least four prior lines of therapy and whose disease is...
As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine by Powles et al, a prespecified interim analysis of the phase III EV-301 trial has shown improved overall survival with enfortumab vedotin-ejfv vs investigator choice of chemotherapy in patients with previously treated advanced urothelial...
As reported in The Lancet by Sezer et al, the phase III EMPOWER-Lung 1 trial has shown improved overall and progression-free survival with cemiplimab-rwlc vs platinum doublet chemotherapy among patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with PD-L1 expression on ≥ 50% of tumor cells...
Each year, following the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS), The ASCO Post asks Jame Abraham, MD, FACP, to offer his picks of the most important and most clinically relevant research presented at this meeting. The following are summaries of studies that caught Dr. Abraham’s attention from ...
In a prespecified interim analysis of the Chinese phase III PHOEBE trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Xu et al found that the combination of the irreversible pan-HER inhibitor pyrotinib plus capecitabine significantly prolonged progression-free survival vs lapatinib plus capecitabine in...
When advising the younger members of our medical community on career decisions, I always list “access to the best mentorship” as the most important priority. By the time we hit residency, we have all proven ourselves able to extract from a book or a journal the facts essential to the practice of...
At the 2021 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium, the KEYNOTE-177 investigators updated their previously reported findings by showing further data relating to subsequent lines of therapy after disease progression. Their conclusion was that patients who received pembrolizumab initially still achieved...
In an updated analysis of the pivotal phase III KEYNOTE-177 trial in microsatellite instability–high (MSI-H) metastatic colorectal cancer, the benefit of first-line pembrolizumab continued beyond disease progression on the subsequent line of treatment, despite a high crossover to immunotherapy for...
This week, we’re continuing our coverage of results presented at the 2021 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium, focusing on research findings in renal cell carcinoma (RCC) and bladder cancer.
Tracy L. Rose, MD, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discusses phase II results of gemcitabine and split-dose cisplatin plus pembrolizumab as neoadjuvant therapy prior to radical cystectomy for patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer. The trial showed this combination...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by McDermott et al, findings in a cohort of the phase II KEYNOTE-427 study showed that pembrolizumab monotherapy produced durable responses as first-line treatment for advanced non–clear cell renal cell carcinoma. In a separate cohort of the study,...
In a Chinese phase III trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Liu et al found that endoscopic nasopharyngectomy was associated with improved overall survival vs intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) in patients with resectable locally recurrent nasopharyngeal carcinoma who had received prior...
In the Australian phase II trial TheraP reported in The Lancet, Michael S. Hofman, FRACP, MBBS, and colleagues found that Lutetium-177–labeled PSMA-617 (LuPSMA) treatment was associated with a higher prostate-specific antigen (PSA) response rate and fewer severe adverse events vs cabazitaxel in...
Every year, significant amounts of drugs left over and unused from single-dose vials are discarded, but because of the way drugs are priced and paid for in the United States, the cost of the discarded amount cannot be recouped, according to a new congressionally mandated report from the National...
Elizabeth R. Plimack, MD, of Fox Chase Cancer Center, discusses key abstracts discussed at this year’s meeting on bladder cancer and offers her views on the latest trends and findings (Abstracts 391, 393, 434).
In the days and weeks leading up to President Biden’s inauguration, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—under the prior administration—issued a number of rules and regulations that affect cancer care delivery. Many of those rules and regulations are now subject to review by the new...
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a revised Medicare Physician Fee Schedule conversion factor of $34.8931 for 2021. This represents a 3.3% reduction from the 2020 conversion factor of $36.0869. CMS updated the conversion factor as a result of a provision in the $1.4...
On December 23, 2020, ASCO submitted comments to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in response to the Reducing Provider and Patient Burden and Promoting Patients’ Electronic Access to Health Information proposed rule. This rule builds on the CMS Interoperability and Patient...
A new article published in JCO Oncology Practice puts forth a framework to guide researchers, health-care leaders, advocates, community- and patient-focused service organizations, and policy leaders in their work to address and promote health equity in cancer care access and treatment outcomes.1...
Molecular profiling allows clinicians to identify the molecular and genetic signatures that help to deliver treatments that are highly specific to a tumor. This tool has made possible a number of advances in the past year that are improving care for patients with gastrointestinal cancers. In...
In case you missed these while attending the 2020 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition, below is a sampler of highlights that were not included in our first round of meeting coverage. Many of these reports are on early-phase clinical trials of agents that may raise...