December 2012

The unifying principle for care delivery in every situation should ideally be centered on complete clinical information, coupled with evidence-based medicine, and filtered through clinical decision support tools.

An ever-deeper understanding of the biology that drives NSCLC is sparking new treatment paradigms that include selecting targeted drugs based on patients' biomarkers.

Recent advances in the characterization of the molecular genetic defects underlying AML, as well as in novel formulations of therapies, are offering hope for improved outcomes.

Circulating tumor cells can be a predictive blood biomarker for recurrence and survival in patients with stage III melanoma and may help identify who will benefit from aggressive adjuvant therapy.

We have come a long way from the microscope of Galileo, but questions remain in actual practice about how close we need to get to help our patients.

Since recovery audit contractors are paid a contingency fee for locating discrepancies, they are quickly becoming viewed as bounty hunters by many practices.

Mark G. Kris, MD, offers insight into NSCLC related topics, including emerging therapeutic targets, the optimal application of TKIs, strategies for patients with poor performance status, maintenance therapies, and the treatment pipeline.

Nab-paclitaxel might offer some hope for patients with advanced urothelial cancer, an area that has lagged behind the rapid growth in available therapies for other genitourinary cancers.

More potent versions of existing therapies are currently under development and showing considerable promise in early clinical trials for patients with multiple myeloma.

Scientists now know a lot more about the genetic landscape of head and neck cancer and hope that eventually this knowledge will lead the way to new therapies.

Over the past decade, the availability of new agents with varying mechanisms of action has greatly enhanced the treatment landscape in castration-resistant prostate cancer.

Local ablative therapy plus continuation on the same tyrosine kinase inhibitor could be utilized as a treatment alternative in metastatic non-small cell lung cancer.

Although the association between VEGF and ovarian cancer has been known for quite some time, researchers are still struggling to use drugs that inhibit VEGF and angiogenesis in patients with the disease.

Circulating tumor cell counts can provide a variety of useful information for clinicians treating patients with metastatic breast cancer.

The prognosis for patients with colorectal cancer has benefited greatly from the advent of advances in chemotherapy and new agents, with nearly threefourths of stage I patients surviving for at least 5 years after diagnosis.

Patients receiving transplants from unrelated donors to treat various hematologic malignancies may benefit more from receiving adult stem cells harvested from bone marrow rather than peripheral-blood stem cells (the current standard).

A retrospective study of older women with early-stage breast cancer who received adjuvant trastuzumab alone or in combination with anthracyclines has revealed a higher incidence of heart failure and cardiomyopathy.

The introduction of tyrosine kinase inhibitors for the treatment of chronic myelogenous leukemia has dramatically changed the course of the disease.