May 27th, 2022 - Key clinical point: Circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) has substantiated its role as a strong prognostic biomarker in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC). However, uncovering its true clinical value for these patients calls for prospective clinical trials with standardized methodologies.

May 27th, 2022 - When Jane Cooke Wright, MD, entered the medical profession in 1945, the notion that toxic drugs could target tumors struck many physicians and patients as outlandish. How could one poison be weaponized against another poison — a cancerous tumor — without creating more havoc? Let alone a combination of two or more chemicals? Yet by the time Wright retired in 1987, chemotherapy treatments that sh...

May 26th, 2022 - Sildenafil (Viagra, Pfizer), a phosphodieterase-5 (PDE-5) inhibitor and a pulmonary-selective vasodilator, may reduce mortality in patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), compared with placebo or standard of care but it does not reduce hospitalizations or acute exacerbations from the disorder, a small meta-analysis suggests. “There have only been four trials investigating sildenafil.

May 26th, 2022 - Tarah J. Ballinger, MD, discusses several trials in metastatic breast cancer (mBC) being presented at the upcoming 2022 American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting. The first study data that Dr Ballinger is excited to learn about are from DESTINY-Breast04, which evaluated patients with HER2-low tumor expression treated with trastuzumab deruxtecan, an antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) that ...

May 26th, 2022 - The biggest cancer conference in the world is back in person after 2 years online during the COVID pandemic. And it appears many are eager to attend the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting in person now that they can. By early May, ASCO already had 30,000 registrations, of which 80% were in person — there were 27,000 hotel reservations. "That's almost identical to where ...

May 26th, 2022 - Editor's note: Find the latest COVID-19 news and guidance in Medscape's Coronavirus Resource Center. The first plant-based COVID vaccine ever produced was approved on February 24 in Canada for adults aged 18 to 64 years. Covifenz, manufactured by Medicago, is to be administered in two intramuscular doses on day 0 and day 21. The originality of this new vaccine lies in its use of recombinant spi...

May 26th, 2022 - Editor's note: Find the latest COVID-19 news and guidance in Medscape's Coronavirus Resource Center. Novavax hitched its wagon to the global coronavirus pandemic. Before most Americans truly grasped the scope of the danger, the small Maryland biotech startup had secured $1.6 billion in U.S. funding for its covid vaccine. Its moonshot goal: delivering 2 billion shots to the world by mid-2021. Al...

May 26th, 2022 - SAN DIEGO – During her third year in the combined Harvard/Massachusetts General Hospital dermatology residency program in 2011, Lilit Garibyan, MD, PhD, attended a lecture presented by R. Rox Anderson, MD, director of the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at MGH. He described the concept of selective cryolipolysis – the method of removing fat by topical cooling that eventually led to the method ...

May 26th, 2022 - Obstetrician Beverly Gray, MD, is already seeing the effects of the Roe v. Wade abortion debate in her North Carolina practice. Dr Beverly Gray The state allows abortion but requires that women get counseling with a qualified health professional 72 hours before the procedure. "Aside from that, we still have patients asking for more efficacious contraceptive methods just in case," said Gray, res...

May 26th, 2022 - Sildenafil (Viagra, Pfizer), a phosphodieterase-5 (PDE-5) inhibitor and a pulmonary-selective vasodilator, may reduce mortality in patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), compared with placebo or standard of care but it does not reduce hospitalizations or acute exacerbations from the disorder, a small meta-analysis suggests. "There have only been four trials investigating sildenafil ...

May 26th, 2022 - Trishna Bharadia has multiple sclerosis and works as a patient engagement consultant and is often asked to participate in clinical trials. Mostly, though, she turns them down. She has to; a resident of rural England, Bharadia lives hours away from most clinical trial sites. Even if one were closer, the medical care typically requires time off work, which is hard for her to get. Bharadia partici...

May 26th, 2022 - After 2 years of being online only, the scientific committee of the European Alliance of Associations for Rheumatology (EULAR) has worked hard to provide a program for the EULAR 2022 Annual Congress that provides the best experience for both in-person and virtual attendees. "Be aware that rheumatology research has not slept over the last 2 years," Hendrik Schulze-Koops, MD, PhD, program chair f...

May 26th, 2022 - Tumors from desmoplastic melanoma, a rare cancer most commonly found on the head or neck, can often be shrunk significantly before surgery by an immunotherapy known as PD-1 blockade, a result that may reduce the need for disfiguring surgery and radiation. These are the findings of a small clinical trial in this disease by researchers from SWOG Cancer Research Network, a cancer clinical trials g...

May 26th, 2022 - A team of researchers from SWOG Cancer Research Network, a cancer clinical trials group funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), have shown that they can use methylation patterns in cell-free DNA (cfDNA) extracted from blood samples to predict which patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer are likely to benefit from chemotherapy before their surgery. In the future, such a biomarker fr...

May 26th, 2022 - OAKLAND, CA – MAY 26, 2022 – Kaiser Permanente, which cares for more than 500,000 cancer patients every year, will present 10 studies at the 2022 ASCO Annual Meeting (June 3-7, 2022 in Chicago) that offer new insights into how to improve the delivery of cancer care so that more patients benefit. Kaiser Permanente researchers contributed to an additional 12 studies focused on novel treatment adv...

May 26th, 2022 - BOSTON - Children with high-risk neuroblastoma had worse outcomes if they were from certain racial/ethnic groups or were on public rather than private insurance, despite being treated in clinical trials with standardized protocols, according to a study led by investigators from Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. The study shows that young patients from historically...

May 26th, 2022 - Medical guidelines for the prophylactic use of colony-stimulating factors (CSFs) to prevent febrile neutropenia (FN) in patients starting chemotherapy are frequently not followed. Researchers from the SWOG Cancer Research Network, a clinical trials group funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), tested whether incorporating guideline recommendations as standing physician orders embedded in...

May 26th, 2022 - Through bioinformatic prospecting, researchers discovered and synthesized a novel, naturally inspired bifunctional lipopeptide antibiotic with a low resistance potential. The antibiotic compound, which the authors named cilagicin, demonstrated potent and broad antimicrobial activity against several Gram-positive bacteria in laboratory tests, including difficult-to-treat resistant strains like C...

May 25th, 2022 - Erin Roesch, MD There have been significant advances in the treatment of human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 positive (HER2+) breast cancer over the past several years, with a recent focus on de-escalation strategies designed to maintain or improve efficacy and decrease toxicity. The phase 2 WSG-ADAPT-HER2+/HR- trial randomly assigned 134 patients (5:2) with HER2+/ hormone receptor negativ.

May 25th, 2022 - Jonathan Silverberg, MD, PhD, MPH The past 5 years have completely transformed the management of atopic dermatitis (AD). Dupilumab is a subcutaneous injection therapy that inhibits the interleukin 4 receptor alpha subunit; it was approved in the United States for the treatment of adults with moderate to severe AD in 2017 and has since been approved for children and adolescents down to 6 years o.