July 2015

With two drugs on the market and more agents in the pipeline, there's little doubt that immunotherapies targeting the PD-1/PD-L1 pathway will become a backbone of oncology treatment in the near future, perhaps replacing chemotherapy in some malignancies.

William F. Elmquist, PharmD, PhD, discusses the impact of the blood-brain barrier upon the effectiveness of anticancer therapies.

Drug developers are moving forward with scores of new agents that may cross the blood brain barrier in several classes of therapy including chemotherapies, molecularly targeted agents, and immunotherapies.

Robert J. Mayer, MD, Joyce A. O'Shaughnessy, MD, and Maurie Markman, MD, highlight top abstracts from ASCO 2015.

Although guideline organizations have now incorporated the results of major clinical trials into treatment paradigms, much controversy remains over how best to sequence therapies in prostate cancer.

All patients with colorectal cancer being considered for treatment with the EGFR inhibitors cetuximab and panitumumab should undergo extended RAS mutational testing to predict their response to the drugs.

Anju Nohria, MD, explains how the Cardio-Oncology Program originated and some of the challenges clinicians face in identifying high-risk patients and monitoring cardiovascular risks.

Although BRCA1/2 mutations have been intensely studied in breast cancer for more than a decade, researchers are still seeking to determine which patient populations should be screened for abnormalities and how best to integrate that information into treatment protocols.

James P. Allison, PhD, was honored in the Scientific Advances category with a 2014 Giants of Cancer Care® award, a program that the Intellisphere® Oncology Specialty Group launched to honor leaders in the field.

Jennifer A. Woyach, MD, discusses examining the role of BTK inhibition in CLL using murine and cellular models and mechanisms of resistance to BTK inhibitor therapy.

The landscape of therapeutic options for patients with myeloma at all phases of treatment has rapidly changed with the development of new drugs and targets.

One promising avenue of exploration of biomarkers in AML is the Krebs cycle, where inhibiting a key metabolic enzyme has proved beneficial in early clinical studies.

Although the entire medical community recognizes the importance of smoking cessation- both for cancer prevention and cardiopulmonary health-supporting patients in their efforts to cease smoking is generally not done well.

The findings from nearly 30 phase III clinical trials across a broad spectrum of malignancies were among the clinically significant highlights presented at the 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting.

For clinicians, a central message from 2015 ASCO is that a framework for managing immune-related adverse events in patients who receive these immune checkpoint agents is taking shape.

Maurie Markman, MD, discusses how the molecular complexities of cancer necessitate that clinical research evolves beyond the basket trial design.