December 2014

When Vincent T. DeVita Jr, MD, began testing a cocktail of four chemotherapies against advanced Hodgkin disease back in 1964, the disease was uniformly fatal.

Leading researchers described several areas of significant advances during the 9th Annual New York Lung Cancer Symposium, a daylong conference that Physicians' Education Resource hosted November 8.

Metastatic melanoma is associated with a poor prognosis, but recent breakthroughs in tumor biology and immune regulation have led to the development of agents that could change clinical practice.

When added to standard chemotherapy, trastuzumab not only dramatically improved disease-free survival rates for patients with metastatic disease, but also resulted in a clear survival advantage unprecedented for most treatments of metastatic breast cancer.

As one of the most significant predictors of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, the BRCA1/2 genes have become the poster child for genetic testing, thrust into the limelight by a high-profile court battle and a celebrity's disclosure.

Although prognostic biomarkers have become increasingly important in the treatment of many types of cancer, no such markers have yet been identified and validated for thyroid cancer.

Dr. Richard T. Penson, Dr. Bradley J. Monk, and Dr. Krishnansu S. Tewari discuss the evolution of cervical cancer treatment over the past five years.

Developing companion diagnostics has several associated challenges related to cost, access to samples, and clinical trial recruitment.

What patients with cancer perceive as relevant clinical outcomes, and how these outcomes are assessed, is important in the provision of routine care and in the arena of clinical trials.

Cetuximab is the only FDA-approved EGFR inhibitor for the treatment of squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck.

Molecular studies are increasingly utilized to develop an individual therapeutic approach based on abnormalities present in the setting of uncommon/rare cancers or in specific clinical situations where it is virtually certain that formal regulatory-based trials will never be undertaken.