November 2013

Through a variety of research roles, Sara Hurvitz, MD, is exploring novel targeted therapies for the treatment of breast cancer, including developing and implementing clinical trials. Her interests include the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K) signaling pathway.

The question of whether fulvestrant (Faslodex) should be moved forward in the treatment timeline for postmenopausal women with advanced, hormone receptor (HR)-positive breast cancer is being evaluated in an international, randomized phase III trial.

As anticancer antibody therapies have evolved into ever more highly engineered and complex structures, so have the manufacturing processes that pave the way for their widespread clinical use.

The UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center and the National Cancer Institute (NCI)-funded National Center for Reducing Asian American Cancer Health Disparities are working to address these disparities through programs to boost participation in clinical trials, collect biospecimens, and conduct blood genomics research.

Although immunotherapy advances in solid tumors have captured much attention in recent years, therapeutic strategies that enable the patient's own immune system to battle cancer cells have long been integrated into the treatment of patients with hematologic malignancies.

Most deaths from breast cancer occur in women who have not been regularly screened and whose tumors are diagnosed at a median age 49 years, confirming the need for the greater use of annual mammography in younger women, according to a recent study that marks the latest episode in the debate over screening guidelines.

The phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase pathway is frequently deregulated in cancer at multiple different points, and has therefore emerged as one of the most deeply explored cell-signaling networks in oncogenic research.

With seven targeted therapies approved for metastatic renal cell carcinoma, researchers and drug developers are now focusing on understanding the best way to sequence these therapies and on identifying predictive biomarkers of response.

During the past three decades, our treatment approach to lymphoma has been based on the underlying histological and clinical features of the disease.

While a number of biological and clinical factors differentiate so-called "solid" from "liquid" cancers, there is perhaps no single difference that is more relevant than the ability in liquid cancers to easily obtain malignant cells from the blood for subsequent analysis in the laboratory.

Head and neck cancer patients who participated in a swallow preservation protocol were less likely to suffer from the detrimental effects associated with dysphagia, a common complication associated with radiation therapy and chemoradiation therapy.