Articles

San Antonio, TX—When copayments were eliminated, annual screening mammography rates among insured rural women improved significantly, researchers from Duke University Comprehensive Cancer Center reported at the 2011 CTRC AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

In 2011, the American Cancer Society projected there would be 20,520 cases of newly diagnosed multiple myeloma (MM) and 10,610 deaths from the disease that year.¹ MM is an incurable hematologic cancer marked by great heterogeneity, in terms of its biology and clinical course.

With so many new myeloma drugs of various classes in the pipeline, “myeloma is going to become a chronic illness, with sustained complete responses in a significant fraction of patients,” according to Kenneth C. Anderson, MD, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, Boston.

San Francisco, CA—Approximately 80% of patients with stage II colon cancer will be cured by surgery alone, but 20% will still relapse. Oncologists struggle with the question of which patients could benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy to reduce this risk, and which patients can be safely observed, without further treatment.

At the 2012 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium, Value-Based Cancer Care (VBCC) asked Al B. Benson, III, MD, FACP, Professor of Medicine, Associate Director for Clinical Investigations, Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Immediate Past President, ACCC, and editorial board member of VBCC, to discuss the growing importance of molecular profiling in cancer care.

San Antonio, TX—One of the few clinical science symposia at the 2011 CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium focused not on clinical issues but on delineating the economic issues facing oncologists.

Ventura County Hematology Oncology Specialists has so far managed to avoid many of the financial difficulties facing a large number of community cancer practices. Value-Based Cancer Care asked Dr Parsa and Ms Rivera to discuss what makes their practice successful from a clinical and a business perspective.

Alternative versions of biologic agents—biosimilars—will be coming soon to a formulary near you. In the meantime, many details must be worked out before patients can be safely and effectively treated with these new products.

Adults with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) have a poor prognosis compared with children, but recent studies suggest that using “pediatric-inspired” regimens can improve outcomes for patients with Philadelphia chromosome(Ph)- negative ALL.