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Over the past decade, Fadlo R. Khuri, MD, Professor and Roberto C. Goizueta Distinguished Chair of Hematology and Medical Oncology, and Deputy Director of the Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, Atlanta, has focused his research and clinical career on investigating novel approaches in the ...
The 2013 European Cancer Congress (ECC), held September 27 to October 1 in Amsterdam, was jointly sponsored by the European Society of Medical Oncology, the European Cancer Organization, and the European Society of Radiation Oncology. With the Congress theme being “Reinforcing Multidisciplinarity,” ...
Identifying ALK rearrangements as a cancer target in patients with lung cancer led to the development and FDA approval of crizotinib (Xalkori) to treat ALK-positive non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Several second-generation ALK inhibitors are in development, and these agents appear to work in...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted regular approval for crizotinib (Xalkori) for the treatment of 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 approval was based...
As reported in Journal of Clinical Oncology by Glenwood D. Goss, MD, of the Ottawa Hospital Cancer Center, and colleagues, the prematurely closed NCIC CTG BR19 study showed no apparent survival benefit of adjuvant gefitinib (Iressa, withdrawn from U.S. market) vs placebo in patients with completely ...
At a recent meeting in Washington, DC, Friends of Cancer Research and the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at the Brookings Institution officially announced activation of the Lung Cancer Master Protocol, a new research strategy that has the potential to hurdle or bypass known clinical trial...
Despite optimal surgical resection and adjuvant chemotherapy with cisplatin-based doublets, the 5-year overall survival for patients with early-stage non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) remains suboptimal. In the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) staging project, the...
This issue of The ASCO Post launches a Clinical Trials Resource Guide to increase awareness of NCI-funded phase I, II, and III clinical studies for your patients with advanced cancer. All of the studies are listed on the National Institutes of Health website at ClinicalTrials.gov. The clinical...
The American Lung Association issued the following statement on December 31, 2013, in response to the recommendation of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) to screen individuals at high risk of lung cancer. “The [USPSTF] made a recommendation that will save lives. The Task Force...
INSIDE THE BLACK BOX is an occasional column offering insight into the FDA and its policies and procedures. This installment addresses a changing paradigm in the treatment of lung cancer, exemplified by concurrent approval of a companion diagnostic with each of several new targeted agents or new...
More than 18% of all lung cancers detected by low-dose computed tomography in the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) may be clinically insignificant. Overdiagnosis should be considered when describing the risks of [low-dose computed tomography] screening for lung cancer, according to a review of...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Breakthrough Therapy designation for dabrafenib (Tafinlar) for the treatment of patients with metastatic BRAF V600E mutation–positive non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who have received at least one prior line of platinum-containing...
Editor’s note: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently issued a report on lung cancer incidence trends in the United States.1 According to the report, incidence rates for lung cancer have decreased between 2005 and 2009, the period evaluated. Lung cancer incidence has...
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has posted a supplemental fact sheet for clinicians on its final recommendation statement on screening for lung cancer.1 This resource is meant to help health-care professionals talk about lung cancer screening with their patients and determine if screening...
The combination of nintedanib and docetaxel “is an effective second-line option” for patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who have received previous treatment with one line of platinum-based therapy, according to results from the phase III LUME-Lung 1 study published in The...
David A. Fullerton, MD, of the University of Colorado School of Medicine, was elected President of The Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) at the Society’s 50th Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida. “STS has been a preeminent medical society for many years,” said Dr. Fullerton. “It is truly a great...
In a study reported in Clinical Cancer Research, Gold and colleagues developed a risk model for recurrence of resected non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) based on protein expression and clinical variables. The study involved analysis of samples from 370 patients with NSCLC resected between 2002 and ...
Early last year, just as I returned to my residency in neurologic surgery at Stanford University after completing 2 years of my postdoctoral fellowship in a laboratory developing optogenetic techniques, I started losing weight—dropping from 180 lb to 160 lb in just 6 months—and I was having fairly...
Clinical trials of antioxidants in cancer have yielded inconsistent results. In a study reported in Science Translational Medicine, Sayin and colleagues evaluated the effects of the antioxidants N-acetylcysteine and vitamin E in mouse models of BRAF- and KRAS-induced lung cancer. N-acetylcysteine...
For decades, dedicated members of the oncology community have fought to increase the nation’s focus on lung cancer prevention and treatment. Although smoking cessation initiatives have reduced cigarette consumption, lung cancer 5-year survival has remained stagnant at 15%, lagging far below most...
The majority of current and former smokers would welcome screenings for lung cancer if their insurance covered the spiral computed tomography (CT) scans, according to research from Roswell Park Cancer Institute and the Medical University of South Carolina. The study by Jennifer Delmerico, MPH, and...
The ASCO Cancer Research Committee recently convened four disease-specific working groups—in pancreas, breast, lung, and colon cancers—to “consider the design of future clinical trials that would produce results that are clinically meaningful to patients.” An ASCO perspective statement, reported in ...
In a phase III trial (LUME-Lung 1) reported in The Lancet Oncology, Reck et al assessed the addition of nintedanib to docetaxel in second-line treatment of non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).1 The combination significantly improved progression-free survival in all patients and improved overall...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted accelerated approval to ceritinib (Zykadia) for patients with a metastatic anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK)-positive non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who were previously treated with crizotinib (Xalkori). Ceritinib is an ALK tyrosine kinase...
Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) harboring ALK rearrangement is sensitive to the ALK inhibitor crizotinib (Xalkori), but resistance ultimately occurs. In a phase I study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Alice T. Shaw, MD, PhD, of Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, Boston, and...
In a systematic review and individual patient meta-analysis reported in The Lancet,1 the NSCLC Meta-analysis Collaborative Group found that neoadjuvant therapy for non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) was associated with a significant 13% reduction in risk of death. Significant benefits in...
In February, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted belinostat (Beleodaq), a targeted histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitor, priority review status based on a pivotal phase II trial in peripheral T-cell lymphoma. Just 1 month later, researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in...
Fibroblast growth factor receptor (FGFR) inhibitors are an emerging area of interest in cancer therapeutics. Studies presented at the 2014 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting in San Diego provided early encouraging data for two investigational pan-FGFR inhibitors for the...
At the 19th Annual Conference of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN), held recently in Hollywood, Florida, NCCN Panel members presented updates for several tumor types, briefly summarized here. For a more complete description of all updates, visit www.nccn.org. Breast Cancer Guidelines ...
Minority patients with lung cancer who receive treatment in practices affiliated with provider-based research networks “have greater hospice enrollment than those treated in academic and community practices,” concluded Dolly C. Penn, MD, MSCR, and colleagues at the University of North Carolina...
As reported in Clinical Cancer Research, Nakaoku and colleagues identified oncogene fusions that function as driver mutations in KRAS wild-type invasive mucinous adenocarcinoma of the lung. Whole-transcriptome sequencing of 32 invasive mucinous adenocarcinomas, including 27 without KRAS mutations,...
There are currently 172 computed tomography (CT)-based lung screening centers up and running in the United States, according to the Lung Cancer Alliance.1 In a presentation at the American Roentgen Ray Society (ARRS) 2014 Annual Meeting in San Diego, Reginald Munden, MD, DMD, MBA, and Ralph...
In the Clinic provides overviews of novel oncology agents, addressing indications, mechanisms, administration recommendations, safety profiles, and other essential information needed for the appropriate clinical use of these drugs. On April 29, 2014, ceritinib (Zykadia) was granted accelerated...
Preliminary evidence suggests that AZD9291, a novel mutant-selective epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) tyrosine kinase inhibitor, may become a treatment option for patients with advanced, EGFR-mutant, non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) that has progressed on standard EGFR inhibitors....
On April 30, 2014, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) convened the Medicare Evidence Development & Coverage Advisory Committee (MEDCAC) to assess the value of low-dose computed tomography (CT) lung cancer screening in the Medicare population. After a decades-long battle,...
A public-private collaboration among the National Cancer Institute (NCI), SWOG Cancer Research, Friends of Cancer Research, the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH), five pharmaceutical companies (Amgen, Genentech, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and AstraZeneca’s global biologics R&D...
Ramucirumab (Cyramza) added to docetaxel improved overall survival compared to chemotherapy alone in patients with stage IV non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) that has progressed on one prior therapy, according to results of a phase III trial presented at the 50th ASCO Annual Meeting.1 The...
Separate studies in early-stage non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) found that the addition of consolidation chemotherapy to concurrent chemoradiotherapy did not improve survival and that adjuvant erlotinib (Tarceva) did not improve survival. There was a suggestion of benefit for adjuvant erlotinib...
Start with the most lethal cancer globally—lung cancer—for which standard approaches result in a modest 5-year survival. Then consider the results from the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST), suggesting in a well done randomized study that significant mortality reduction does occur with low-dose...
A study by investigators at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has indicated that people who are highly addicted to nicotine, ie, those who smoke their first cigarette within 5 minutes after awakening, are at higher risk of developing lung cancer than those who wait for 1 hour or more to smoke....
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the world as well as in the United States, where it is the leading cancer killer in both men and women. The majority of lung cancer patients present with metastatic (stage IV) disease that cannot be cured with current therapies. Standard cytotoxic ...
The Lung Cancer Mutation Consortium (LCMC) was formed to test adenocarcinomas of the lung for 10 oncogenic drivers in order to enable clinicians to select targeted treatments and enroll patients into suitable clinical trials. As recently reported in JAMA by Mark G. Kris, MD, William and Joy Ruane...
Monoclonal antibodies targeting the programmed death receptor-1 (PD-1) pathway are expected to answer an unmet need in non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). With first-line platinum-doublets, 1-year overall survival is 30% to 50%, and while treatments targeting sensitizing mutations are more...
Researchers at the University of California Davis have determined that surgical biopsies can be safely performed on select patients with late-stage non-small cell lung cancer, which should enhance their access to drugs that target specific genetic mutations such as epidermal growth factor receptor...
Oncologists now have a means of bringing personalized medicine to advanced squamous cell carcinoma, and it involves a biomarker-driven clinical trial that maximizes the chance of successful treatment and new drug approvals. Lung-MAP (Lung Cancer Master Protocol) is a unique concept in which the...
Despite promising new agents and therapeutic approaches, 5-year lung cancer survival rates have lagged far behind those of most other malignancies. To shed light on some of the important issues facing lung cancer experts, The ASCO Post recently spoke with internationally recognized lung cancer...
Patients with poor performance status have an increased incidence of adverse effects from therapy and worse overall outcomes than those with good performance status, but “a selected proportion may still benefit from standard therapy,” according to a review article published in the Journal of the...
The Addario Lung Cancer Medical Institute (ALCMI) recently launched a new study, the Genomics of Young Lung Cancer, to understand why lung cancer occurs in young adults, who quite often are athletic, never smokers and do not exhibit any of the known lung cancer genetic mutations. ALCMI, a...
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) recently presented to Congress a scientific framework that lays out important steps needed to make advances in small cell lung cancer. The report, entitled “Scientific Framework for Small Cell Lung Cancer (SCLC)” was mandated by the Recalcitrant Cancer Research...
INSIDE THE BLACK BOX is an occasional column providing insight into the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and its policies and procedures. In this installment, FDA oncologists Sean Khozin, MD, MPH, and Dikran Kazandjian, MD, discuss anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK)-positive non–small cell...