March 2013

Fatigue in patients with advanced cancer may be alleviated by systematically managing other physical symptoms, such as pain, nausea, and lack of appetite.

An interview with José Baselga, MD, PhD, who helped to develop new drugs and combination therapies for the treatment of breast cancer, including the early targeted therapy trastuzumab and the more recent pertuzumab.

Oncology continues to lead all therapeutic areas in drug development research, with nearly 5500 of more than 17,000 projects in the works.

Follicular lymphoma is characterized by repeated treatment responses and then relapses, and until more effective frontline therapies become available, researchers will need to generate a growing list of drug choices to keep pace with patients' needs.

José Baselga, MD, PhD, explores the dual inhibition of cell-signaling pathways in breast cancer on several fronts, including new therapies for patients with the HER2-positive subtype and novel ways to target mTOR and the PI3K/Akt/mTOR pathway.

There have been waves of advancements in the treatment of multiple myeloma and further exploration of existing regimens and research into novel therapeutics hold the promise of advances.

Combining two commonly used drugs for myeloproliferative neoplasms achieved what the individual drugs could not: a high response rate with few side effects.

Interferons have evolved from a "cure-all" for cancer, as they were initially touted, to a more tempered yet equally vital role in treating a number of different disease states, including many different types of cancer.

For more than 20 years, Ahmed Lasfar, PhD, has been exploring the cell-signaling activity of interferons and he has been involved in the characterization of a new type of interferon, IFNλ, and its antitumor activity.

A clinical commentary by Maurie Markman, MD, addressing whether overall survival can still be considered the sole acceptable primary endpoint in studies of novel anticancer therapeutic strategies.

While there is no standard treatment for most patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia who are age 65 years and older, several regimens are being tested in clinical trials.

Recently reported data demonstrate that the presence of a specific mutation in PDGFRA predicts for the lack of activity for the imatinib in patients with gastrointestinal stromal tumors.

AGS-003, a personalized dendritic cell immunotherapy, demonstrated prolonged survival benefits in patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma, with one-third of those who took the drug during a phase II trial still alive after nearly four years.