Vol. 17/No. 15

Maha H. Hussain, MB ChB, whose work has helped advance treatment and care of men with prostate cancer, was honored in the Genitourinary Cancer category with a 2015 Giants of Cancer Care® award, a program that the Intellisphere® Oncology Specialty Group launched to recognize leaders in the field.

Although it has been nearly 10 years since a new systemic drug has been approved for the treatment of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma, the field is changing rapidly due to new therapies for a prime underlying cause of the disease and advances in interventional radiology.

Despite a leap forward in our understanding of the molecular mechanisms of cancer pain in the past several decades, clinical translation of targeted therapies has been slow.

Brian L. Schmidt, DDS, MD, PhD, discusses the difficulties of studying cancer pain and developing new drugs.

A collection of clinical trials that uses a target-specific and tissue-agnostic algorithm to rapidly match patients to investigational therapies aimed at the tumor's molecular makeup takes the approach that "one trial really does not fit all."

Discussions with patients must carefully consider the understandable desire of patients for definitive and hopeful information while at the same time appreciating that poorly understood biology often makes definitive statements and declarations regarding prognosis problematic and not infrequently incorrect.

There’s no question that checkpoint blockade immunotherapy agents, most notably those directed at the PD-1/PD-L1 pathway, will continue to grow in importance as an anticancer modality in a rising number of tumor types.

There is some evidence that relatively short treatment courses might also be appropriate for other checkpoint inhibitors approved for treating some cancers, but the data are fairly sparse.