The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has approved ASCO’s Quality Oncology Practice Initiative (QOPI®) as a pathway for oncologists to meet the agency’s quality reporting requirements. Starting in the fall of 2014, oncology practices registered with QOPI will have the opportunity to...
Gary H. Lyman, MD, MPH, FASCO, is Co-Director of the Hutchinson Institute for Cancer Outcomes Research, a Full Member of the Divisions of Public Health Sciences and Clinical Research at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and Professor of Medicine, Public Health, and Pharmacy at the...
In February 2014, ASCO launched a new member publication, ASCO Connection: Trainee & Early-Career Oncologists. This quarterly magazine-style publication is dedicated to topics of interest to medical students, interns, residents, fellows, and junior faculty. All ASCO Student/Non-Oncology...
Oncology fellows just years away from entering the profession full time may have unrealistic expectations of their future career, according to data published recently in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The study by Tait D. Shanafelt, MD, of the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, and colleagues...
ASCO is among the medical professional societies supporting the National Colorectal Cancer Roundtable (NCCRT) by recruiting physician leaders from within its membership for a pilot program called Links of Care. The program was established to promote health equity and to improve access to colorectal ...
The following essay by Julie Vose, MD, MBA, FASCO, is adapted from The Big Casino: America’s Best Cancer Doctors Share Their Most Powerful Stories (May 2014), coedited by Stan Winokur, MD, and Vincent Coppola. The book is available on Amazon.com and thebigcasino.org. When I met Cindy, she was...
BOOKMARK Title: The Good Doctor: A Father, a Son, and the Evolution of Medical EthicsAuthor: Barron H. Lerner, MDPublisher: Beacon PressPublication date: May 13, 2014Price: $25.95; hardcover, 240 pages One morning in 1996, an infectious disease specialist was making rounds when he and his team...
ASCO booklet to help patients learn how to manage weight gain after a cancer diagnosis is now available in Spanish. In addition, new information in Spanish has been added to Cancer.Net on obesity, weight, and cancer risk, as well as articles on nutrition and physical activity. Your patients can...
On this historic year, as ASCO proudly commemorates its 50th anniversary and decades of evolutionary change and growth, it also celebrates the significant progress that has been made against cancer throughout history. ASCO’s anniversary website, CancerProgress.Net, chronicles these achievements and ...
ASCO recently launched a new and redesigned version of Cancer.Net, its patient-facing website that includes timely, comprehensive, and oncologist-approved information. With support from the Conquer Cancer Foundation, Cancer.Net is able to bring the expertise and resources of ASCO to your patients...
To mark ASCO’s 50th anniversary, the Society called on the oncology community to select the five most pivotal advances in cancer research and patient care over the past 50 years. Now, with more than 2,000 votes cast, ASCO has announced the results on CancerProgress.Net, its interactive website on...
Dartmouth researchers have developed a fluorescence imaging technique that can more accurately identify receptors for targeted cancer therapies without a tissue biopsy. They report on their findings in a recently published article in Cancer Research.1 “Protein overexpression is a hallmark of...
ASCO has launched CancerLinQ.org to house all news and information about this cutting-edge health information technology platform that will provide real-time quality feedback to providers, uncover patterns that can improve care, and feed personalized decision support to physicians. Learn how the...
The text and photographs on this page are excerpted from a four-volume series of books titled Oncology Tumors & Treatment: A Photographic History, by Stanley B. Burns, MD, FACS. The photos below are from the volume titled “The Radium Era: 1916–1945.” To view additional photos from this series...
The 2014 ASCO Quality Care Symposium was held October 17 to 18 in Boston and featured research on combating disparities, improving end-of-life care, and finding opportunities for cost reduction. These highlights have been adapted from ASCO Quality Care Symposium Daily News (quality.asco.org/dn)....
The Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University, in collaboration with the Northwestern Medicine Developmental Therapeutics Institute and Northwestern Memorial Hospital, has launched a new research program, Northwestern Onco-SET (Sequence, Evaluate, Treat). The program’s...
Dana-Farber President and CEO Edward J. Benz, Jr, MD, has announced he will retire from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) in 2016, after 16 years running the organization. Dr. Benz will also vacate the positions as Director and Principal Investigator of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center...
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital announced the departure of Scientific and Comprehensive Cancer Center Director, Richard Gilbertson, MD, PhD. Dr. Gilbertson will be Director of the Cambridge Cancer Centre at the University of Cambridge. Since joining St. Jude in 2000, Dr. Gilbertson has led...
Jane Carrie Weeks, MD, MSc, a prominent researcher at Dana-Farber Cancer Center, died of cancer on September 10, 2013, at the age of 61. At the time of her death, Dr. Weeks was Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public ...
As the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) celebrates its 20th year, The ASCO Post asked its Chief Executive Officer, Robert W. Carlson, MD, to reflect on the organization’s accomplishments, mission, and future and on the role he may have played in its success. The Early Years You became...
At the end of May, more than 25,000 oncology professionals from around the world will meet in Chicago for the 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting. This year’s theme, “Illumination & Innovation: Transforming Data into Learning,” reflects the current state of oncology. The accelerating volume and variety of ...
In a study reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Kobold and colleagues assessed whether combining tumor-specific T cells modified with a marker antigen and a bispecific antibody that selectively recognizes transduced T cells and tumor cells could improve T-cell recruitment to...
Innovation in the field of genomic assessment and characterization has rapidly progressed in recent years. As next-generation sequencing increasingly becomes a standard of care, it is vital for cancer care providers to develop a deeper understanding of its research and clinical applications. For...
ASCO, together with 30 organizations, have sent a letter to President Obama asking for his leadership in giving the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the authority to regulate e-cigarettes and other currently unregulated tobacco products. The 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control ...
Internationally renowned oncologist David Kerr, MD, DSc, will serve as founding Editor-in-Chief of the new ASCO publication, Journal of Global Oncology (JGO). JGO will be the first journal focused exclusively on cancer research, treatment, and care delivery in middle- and low-resource countries...
Direct your patients to www.cancer.net/blog for podcasts with ASCO experts discussing the research that was presented at the 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting. This series of “Research Round Up” podcasts provides the latest information on treatment and care for people with cancer and will help your patients ...
Registration is now open for the Community Research Forum (CRF) Annual Meeting, which will take place on September 20 to 21, at ASCO Headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. Join fellow physician investigators and research staff from all types of community-based research sites and programs to discuss...
ASCO has released Practical Tips for the Oncology Practice 6th Edition, a comprehensive business and management resource for oncology practices. Recognizing the increasing burdens that oncology practices face in today’s healthcare delivery system, ASCO is releasing this guide with new information...
Be sure to check out Cancer.Net’s ASCO Answers fact sheets on a variety of topics, including diagnosis and treatment options, side effects, and more than 25 cancer types. These one-page (front and back) introductions include an overview, illustrations, terms to know, and questions to ask the...
Earlier this summer, Lidia Schapira, MD, FASCO, a medical oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, was named Editor-in-Chief of Cancer.Net, ASCO’s patient information website. Prior to taking on this role, Dr....
Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO) annually publishes several Special Series of reviews—disease-specific issues dedicated to providing readers with concise, authoritative updates on important topics in oncology practice. Each issue of the Special Series explores one specific area of cancer care...
Northwestern University has received a 5-year, $11.7 million grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to use nanotechnology to develop next-generation cancer treatments. With NCI support, the new Northwestern University Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence (Northwestern CCNE) will use...
The United States—and much of the world—is experiencing unprecedented demographic shifts in the population of older people, defined as people age 65 and over. In 2012, the population of older people in the United States reached a never-before seen height of 43.1 million, a number that will more...
ASCO is preparing to expand the boundaries of precision medicine with the launch of its first clinical trial. At a press briefing during the 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting, the Society formally announced its plans for the Targeted Agent and Profiling Utilization Registry (TAPUR) study. At a time when...
The American Society of Hematology (ASH) will honor Alfred Goldberg, PhD, of Harvard Medical School, and Paul Richardson, MD, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, with the 2015 Ernest Beutler Lecture and Prize for their significant research advances in the area of proteasome inhibitors and their...
The ASCO Post is pleased to reproduce installments of the “Art of Oncology” as published previously in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO). These articles focus on the experience of suffering from cancer or of caring for people diagnosed with cancer, and they include narratives, topical essays,...
Breast cancer afflicts 1 in 8 women in their lifetime, and 1 in 25 die from this disease. Although a number of randomized trials have demonstrated the clear benefits of mammography screening in women up to age 74 on reducing mortality, data are sparse in women over age 74, especially among...
In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Killelea et al found that chemotherapy, particularly neoadjuvant chemotherapy, was more frequently given to black, Hispanic, and Asian women vs white women with stage I to III breast cancer, with the difference largely attributable to more...
The requirement for tumor tissue specimens and associated analyses in order to participate in clinical trials appears to be a significant barrier to clinical trial enrollment and may delay treatment. Potential solutions to reducing or eliminating these barriers include routine tissue banking at...
Rapidly dividing cells rely on an enzyme called Dicer to help them repair the DNA damage that occurs as they make mistakes in copying their genetic material over and over for new cells. Researchers have built on the discovery of Dicer’s role in fixing DNA damage to uncover a new potential...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Basch et al, a trial conducted among patients receiving routine outpatient chemotherapy for advanced solid tumors at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center indicated that patient use of tablet computers to report common symptoms was associated with ...
A gene that is known to suppress the growth and spread of many types of cancer has the opposite effect in some forms of colorectal cancer, University of Missouri (MU) School of Medicine researchers have found. It is a finding that may lay the foundation for new colorectal cancer treatments. Results ...
Long travel distances continue to be a significant obstacle to breast reconstruction after mastectomy for breast cancer, according to a study published by Abornoz et al in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. “While greater patient awareness and insurance coverage have contributed to greater...
An analysis published by Tarazi et al in the Journal of Cancer Survivorship found that even in the health-care landscape before the Affordable Care Act, cancer survivors in states that had already expanded Medicaid coverage prior to passage of the Act had more access to health care than cancer...
More patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) could benefit from pembrolizumab (Keytruda), said Roy Herbst, MD, PhD, Chief of Medical Oncology at Yale Cancer Center and Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven. Dr. Herbst presented promising results from the pivotal phase...
Five percent of cancer patients and their families were pushed into poverty in Southeast Asia between March 2012 and September 2013 because of high disease-related costs, a study (Abstract 52O) by Bhoo-Pathy et al at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Asia 2015 Congress in Singapore...
A large prospective study of postmenopausal women investigating an association between periodontal disease and breast cancer risk has found that among all women in the study, the risk of breast cancer was 14% higher in women who had periodontal disease. Among women who had quit smoking within the...
Follow-up times of abnormal screening exams were shorter for breast cancer than they were for colorectal and cervical cancers, according to a recent study involving more than 1 million individuals who underwent these screenings. Recently published by Tosteson et al in the Journal of General...
In a study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Shain et al identified the order of occurrence of mutations in the progression of melanoma as well as characterized point mutation burden and chromosomal instability during disease evolution. Study Details The study involved sequencing...
In a Swedish study reported in The Lancet Oncology (Stockholm 3 study), Grönberg et al found that a screening model including prostate-specific antigen (PSA) and other plasma protein markers, genetic polymorphisms, and clinical variables improved the accuracy of detecting prostate cancer with...