August 2014

As precision medicine continues to evolve in cancer care, the development of highly sophisticated tests that leverage the explosion of knowledge about the molecular and protein characteristics of an individual patient's tumor has emerged as its own scientific frontier.

Revelations About Cancer Mutations Predate Technological Advances

Terence Friedlander, MD, specializes in understanding the basic biology of genitourinary cancer, in particular cancer of the bladder and prostate, in developing new treatments and studying new ways to overcome treatment resistance.

Breakthrough pain is a common and disabling reality for patients with advanced cancer. Its root causes vary, and experts agree that this type of pain is often inadequately managed.

Although standard induction therapy produces complete remissions in 50% to 70% of patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), long-term survival is seen in only 20% to 40% of patients. The prognosis for older patients is even worse, with a 5-year survival rate of 5% for patients older than 65 years.

Although hormone-targeting strategies have been a mainstay of prostate and breast cancer therapies for decades, an improved understanding of the mechanisms underlying these malignancies has led researchers to focus fresh attention on the complex activity of the androgen receptor (AR) as a point of attack.

Immunotherapy is rapidly emerging as a very attractive and novel therapeutic approach for cancer, including for glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), the most common primary malignant brain tumor in adults.

Although advances in endocrine therapy for women with estrogen receptor (ER)-positive breast cancer have been made in recent years, de novo and acquired resistance to treatments remain important clinical problems, and efforts to identify effective modalities to overcome this challenge continue.

Scarcely a week goes by without a report in the peer-reviewed medical literature suggesting that a novel somatic genomic alteration or a specific normal polymorphism is potentially relevant to achieving a desirable clinical outcome within cancer medicine.

Twenty million people in the United States have died from cigarette smoking since 1965.

Although no cytotoxic agents are currently correlated with specific subtypes of triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), recent findings indicate that targeting genomic stability, antimetastatic mechanisms, and protein expression characteristics are promising approaches for future TNBC treatments.

In our coverage of the 13th Annual International Congress on the Future of Breast Cancer, which Physicians' Education Resource hosted in California, we focus on aspects of clinical care that may be influenced by the ever-growing body of knowledge about the molecular nature of breast cancer.

A randomized multicenter trial examining the efficacy of adding dehydroepiandosterone (DHEA) to a vaginal bioadhesive moisturizer in postmenopausal survivors of breast or gynecologic cancer has found that daily rather than as-needed use of such a moisturizer significantly relieves symptoms of vaginal atrophy in these women.

A wearable device that uses electric fields to disrupt the activity of cancer cells has demonstrated survival benefits among patients with recurrent glioblastoma multiforme in real-world settings, particularly among individuals treated in earlier stages of progression

Basal cell carcinoma (BCC) is the most common human malignancy and by far the most prevalent form of skin cancer, accounting for more than 80% of all cases.