Jan 24th, 2023 - Six weeks of neoadjuvant chemotherapy for patients with operable colon cancer is safe and results in downstaging, increased complete resection rates, and better disease control at 2 years, according to results from the randomized FOxTROT trial. Patients allocated to neoadjuvant chemotherapy followed by 18 weeks of postoperative chemotherapy had a 16.9% risk of residual or recurrent disease with...

Jan 19th, 2023 - Tumor-informed circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) testing for residual disease was able to distinguish patients with colorectal cancer (CRC) at risk for recurrence after surgery, as well as those who could safely avoid adjuvant chemotherapy, according to a large prospective study from Japan. Over a median follow-up of 16.7 months, 61% of patients who were ctDNA-positive 4 weeks after surgery had rec...

Dec 16th, 2022 - NCI Director Monica Bertagnolli, MD, announced that she has early-stage hormone receptor-positive/HER2-negative breast cancer but expects to continue her role except for possible breaks for treatment. New insight into how aggressive breast cancers survive chemotherapy and resist immunotherapy. (Tulane University, Nature Cancer) Faron Pharmaceuticals Oy announced preliminary clinical activity wi...

Dec 13th, 2022 - SAN ANTONIO — While major reports on hormone receptor (HR)–positive breast cancer took center stage at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) 2022, research highlighting new findings in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) stood out as well. Medscape Medical News spoke with SABCS program director Virginia Kaklamani, MD, leader of the Breast Cancer Program at UT Health, San Antonio, and...

Dec 13th, 2022 - A new generation of treatments appears to have caused U.S. melanoma mortality rates to plunge between 2013 and 2017 for the first time in 4 decades, a new study finds, although the dip appeared to stabilize over the next 2 years. Dr Navkirat Kahlon "This data is very encouraging and represents the real-world effectiveness of these newer therapies, which include immunotherapies and targeted ther...

Dec 13th, 2022 - SAN Antonio – How do you shoot at an invisible target? It seems counterintuitive, but trastuzumab deruxtecan (T-DXd) (Enhertu), which combines an antibody targeted to HER2 with a toxic payload, showed promising preliminary activity against localized hormone receptor–positive breast cancers with only low levels of HER2 expression (HR+/HER2-low). Dr Aditya Bardia n the investigator-initiated TRIO...

Dec 13th, 2022 - NEW ORLEANS — Children with Hodgkin lymphoma can be cured with intensive chemotherapy, radiation, and other modalities, but a large majority of patients who survive into adulthood may pay a steep price years later in terms of accelerated aging and neurocognitive impairment. The findings come from a study of nearly 500 individuals in their late 30s, of whom 215 were adult survivors of pediatric ...

Dec 13th, 2022 - SAN ANTONIO — When choosing between chemotherapy and endocrine therapy for patients with hormone receptor (HR)+/HER2- metastatic breast cancer, allowing the results from a blood test that measures circulating tumor cell (CTC) count to overrule physician's choice of therapy can significantly improve overall survival. But are these results enough to change clinical practice? One expert reacting t...

Dec 13th, 2022 - SAN ANTONIO – Results of a study being hailed as practice changing showed that, for pre- or perimenopausal women with aggressive hormone receptor-positive, HER2-negative (HR+/HER2–) untreated breast cancers, the combination of the cyclin-dependent kinase 4/6 (CDK4/6) inhibitor ribociclib (Kisqali) and endocrine therapy offers a safer and equally efficacious alternative to combination chemothera...

Dec 13th, 2022 - This transcript has been edited for clarity. Jacob Sands, MD: I'm Dr Jacob Sands, thoracic medical oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Welcome to Medscape's InDiscussion series on lung cancer. Today, we'll be discussing disparities in lung cancer diagnosis and treatment. But first, let me introduce my guest, Dr Narjust Florez, associate director of the Cancer Care Equity Program, a ...

Dec 12th, 2022 - Women with breast cancer at more than one site can undergo breast-conserving therapy and still have local recurrence rates well under the acceptable threshold of risk, suggest the results of first prospective study of this issue. The ACOSOG-Z11102 trial involved more than 200 women with primarily endocrine receptor–positive (ER+), human epidermal growth factor receptor 2–negative (HER2-) breast...

Dec 12th, 2022 - Women who have survived hormone receptor (HR+) breast cancer can interrupt their endocrine therapy for up to 2 years to pursue pregnancy without affecting their short-term disease outcomes, suggest results from the prospective POSITIVE trial. The study involved more than 500 premenopausal women from 20 countries who had received at least 18 months of endocrine therapy for HR+ breast cancer. Aft...

Dec 12th, 2022 - SAN ANTONIO – Black women with estrogen receptor–positive, HER2-negative (ER+/HER2–) breast cancers have higher levels of a marker of distant metastasis in residual tumors following neoadjuvant chemotherapy, compared with White women, a discovery that may at least partially explain racial differences in breast cancer outcomes, investigators say. The finding, which comes from a retrospective stu...

Dec 12th, 2022 - This transcript has been edited for clarity. I'm Dr Maurie Markman from Cancer Treatment Centers of America. I want to discuss a very interesting paper that recently appeared in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, entitled, "Overall Survival With Maintenance Olaparib at a 7-Year Follow-up in Patients With Newly Diagnosed Advanced Ovarian Cancer and a BRCA Mutation: The SOLO1/GOG 3004 Trial." Most...

Dec 11th, 2022 - NEW ORLEANS — Investigators confessed to being "astonished" by results of a randomized trial showing that patients with acute myeloid leukemia who have a poor response following induction therapy do just as well going on to immediate allogeneic transplant as they would if they had received an intensive salvage induction regimen to get them into remission before transplant. The results come from...

Dec 9th, 2022 - This transcript has been edited for clarity. This is Mark Kris from Memorial Sloan Kettering. A few months ago, I was asked by Wylie Hosmer, a medical oncologist from Hartford, Connecticut, to speak to his disease management team group about issues in the treatment of early-stage patients with non–small cell lung cancers. It's an area that is very vibrant, there are many new drugs available, an...

Dec 9th, 2022 - This transcript has been edited for clarity. Hello. It's Mark Kris, continuing our discussion on advances in the treatment of patients with early-stage lung cancers. In an earlier discussion, we talked about the appropriateness of either neoadjuvant nivolumab with chemotherapy followed by surgery or surgery followed by cisplatin-based chemotherapy and then followed by nivolumab. I think both re...

Dec 8th, 2022 - This transcript has been edited for clarity. Sumanta Pal, MD: Welcome to Medscape InDiscussion. My name is Monty Pal, and I'm a genitourinary medical oncologist at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center in Los Angeles. You're in for a real treat today. We're going to be meeting with Dr Rana McKay who's an associate professor at the University of California San Diego. I got to know Dr McKa...

Dec 8th, 2022 - This transcript has been edited for clarity. I'm David Kerr, professor of cancer medicine from University of Oxford. Let's talk about a lovely paper that's been published by Jeanne Tie and colleagues in The New England Journal of Medicine. It's a clever study that looks at the role of circulating tumor (ct)DNA in the adjuvant setting. We've talked about this many times, but we know that for sta...

Dec 8th, 2022 - SAN ANTONIO — The Breast Cancer Index (BCI) gene test, which is usually used to predict the benefit of extended endocrine therapy, could be performed earlier in order to determine whether premenopausal women with early-stage hormone receptor (HR)–positive disease should receive ovarian function suppression (OFS). This is the suggestion from researchers reporting a new analysis of data from the ...