Articles

The Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) tool can inform clinical care delivery for patients with cancer, according to the initial results of a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded project.

In a new study, researchers analyzed data from 2 trials to determine if early tumor shrinkage was associated with long-term outcomes in patients with colorectal cancer receiving first-line treatment with cetuximab (Piessevaux H, et al. J Clin Oncol. 2013;31:3764-3775).

The prognosis for patients with pancreatic cancer is poor, even for patients with surgically resectable tumors. Gemcitabine (Gemzar) is the standard chemotherapy for advanced pancreatic cancer.

In a new exploratory analysis, researchers evaluated the relationship between PSA doubling time and BMFS, time to first bone metastasis, and OS in recipients of denosumab and placebo (Smith MR, et al. J Clin Oncol. 2013;31:3800-3806).

Empire Genomics, an emerging molecular diagnostics company focused on cancer diagnostics, has recently received approval from the New York State Department of Health for its diagnostic test facility.

A new collaborative initiative among Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has been established to create treatment pathways based on precision (or personalized) medicine for patients with advanced cancer and to try to accelerate the development of personalized therapies.

A simplified administration schedule of only 1 dose, instead of the current standard of 3 doses, of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine appears to be all women need to be protected from cervical cancer, according to new data from a study funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and recently published (Safaeian M, et al. Cancer Prev Res [Phila]. 2013;6:1242-1250).

Researchers led by Nobuhide Ueki, PhD, Assistant Research Profes­sor, Department of Molecular Genetics & Microbiology, Stony Brook University, have found a new way to get targeted cancer drugs to selectively affect only the cancer cells of a patient and not the healthy cells that are also normally affected by the drug (and cause its toxicity), thereby removing many of the potential side effects of the drugs, which would of course greatly enhance the value of cancer drugs.

A few days after the first drug with a breakthrough therapy designation was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), ibrutinib (Imbruvica; Pharmacyclics/Janssen Biotech)—the second drug with such a designation—received an accelerated FDA approval for the treatment of patients with mantle-cell lymphoma (MCL), a rare form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). MCL represents approximately 6% of all cases of NHL in the United States.

Using its priority review pathway, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the monoclonal antibody obinutuzumab (Gazyva; Genentech) for the treatment of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) who have not previously received treatment for CLL. Obinutuzumab is approved to be used in combination with chlorambucil.