November 2014

Steven Rosenberg always knew that he wanted to become a physician scientist, and he quickly advanced to become the chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at just 34 years of age.

Since the modern era of anticancer immunotherapy began about four years ago, a variety of strategies to awaken the patient's own defenses against tumor cells have been reported.

Despite numerous reports of "miracle cures" for a select few patients treated with a variety of different anticancer therapies, drugs that failed to show improvement for a large number of patients have historically been considered failures and have been shelved.

When Marcela V. Maus, MD, PhD, thinks of the challenge of bringing chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapies to market in the battle against cancer, she is reminded of the auto industry's first days.

Confusion persists about the best choice of frontline therapy for patients with metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) after a landmark clinical trial that was conceived a decade ago to answer that question concluded without a superiority finding

The 5-year survival rate for patients with metastatic colorectal cancer (CRC) remains dismal.

Those of us who have treated patients with breast cancer for any extended period of time can likely share anecdotes about watching the treatment of this disease evolve to levels many of us could only have imagined when we began practicing.

Amid a coming storm of demographic trends signaling a sharp increase in the number of older people diagnosed with cancer in the United States, researchers are developing new geriatric assessment tools to help oncology specialists better manage this patient population.

As therapy options for patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma have expanded in recent years, so have clinical considerations about how best to incorporate new agents into the treatment paradigm.

It is increasingly recognized that the era of treating individual advanced or metastatic cancers based essentially on the anatomic site of origin or histologic subtype as determined by light microscopic evaluation is rapidly coming to a close.

Substantial clinical trial evidence supports the use of pathologic complete response (pCR) as a measure for evaluating neoadjuvant therapies for patients with HER2-positive breast cancer, suggesting that preoperative treatment should be the standard of care

The treatment landscape for patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is rapidly changing, with the emergence of four new therapeutic options for this malignancy in recent months.

At least 30 companies are seeking to develop the next generation of circulating tumor cell (CTC) technology, part of an emerging focus on analyzing the biofluids of patients with cancer as a "liquid biopsy," particularly for solid tumors.