Articles

TMed will improve the selection of treatments by adding back and analyzing all the relevant data about the variability of response and the multiplicity of causes…from thousands, if not millions, of patients.

Clinicians will soon have more targeted therapies at their disposal, including drugs with novel mechanisms of action.

Enzalutamide (Xtandi) outperformed bicalutamide (Casodex) in separate phase 2 clinical trials of men with prostate cancer, according to data presented at the 2015 American Urological Association annual meeting.

The definition of value by patients with cancer does not necessarily coincide with other definitions by other stakeholders.

The National Cancer Institute estimates that 231,840 American women will be diagnosed with breast cancer, and nearly 40,300 women will die from the disease in 2015. Overall, 61% of women with breast cancer are diagnosed while the disease is confined to the breast; for these women, the 5-year survival rate is 98.6%. However, for women with metastatic breast cancer, the 5-year survival rate falls sharply, to 26%.

Washington, DC—Personalized medicine is the best way to take advantage of innovation in therapy, but the method in which it is paid for must be addressed to fully realize its potential, said Michael Kolodziej, MD, National Medical Director, Oncology Solutions, Aetna, at the Fifth Annual Conference of the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care.

Washington, DC—Emerging trends in oncology care management include economic transparency, high-value narrow networks (now also referred to as “power networks”), patient–provider profile matching, and an evolving role for risk management. Narrow networks have been shown to lower overall costs and premiums, reduce care variation, and increase patient outcomes and satisfaction, said Grant D. Lawless, RPh, MD, Associate Professor, Clinical Pharmacy and Economics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, at the Fifth Annual Con­ference of the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care.

Philadelphia, PA—Now that a number of targeted therapies are available for the treatment of cancer, one of the big questions is how to best combine them, especially for patients with few other good treatment options.

New Orleans, LA—Prostate cancer may soon have a new biomarker. The cell surface amino acid glypican-1 (GPC-1) was shown in a pilot study to have specificity of 70% for prostate cancer with a sensitivity of >30%, said Jonathan Henderson, MD, a urologist at Regional Urology in Shreveport, LA, at the 2015 American Urological Association meeting.

A clinical trial has shown that patients with a specific molecular subtype of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) are more likely to respond to the drug ibrutinib (Imbruvica) than patients with another molecular subtype of the disease. The study appeared online July 20, 2015, in Nature Medicine.