Personalized Medicine

Grapevine, TX—A New Jersey research team is making the case for relying less on the Oncotype DX test for breast-cancer prognosis and instead focusing on conventional pathological analyses.

San Antonio, TX—Women with estrogen receptor (ER)-positive breast cancer are unlikely to benefit from dosedense chemotherapy, but many are receiving this type of treatment, which involves the use of colonystimulating factors (CSFs), that is, growth factors. Limiting the use of these therapies in a population that is unlikely to benefit from it, would save nearly $40 million annually, suggests a study presented at the 2011 CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

We conducted a literature search for data supporting same-day chemotherapy administration sequences. This was achieved by searching PubMed using keywords and any combination of the drug name with "administration," "sequencing," or "interactions."

Basal-cell carcinoma (BCC) and squamous-cell carcinoma (SCC), commonly referred to as non-melanoma skin cancers (NMSCs), are the most common types of cancers in the United States. These 2 cancers account for approximately 2 million cases of skin cancer annually.

Feedback from their peers helped physicians refrain from ordering unnecessary tests for patients with newly diagnosed cancer, according to a recent study (Miller DC, et al. J Urol. 2011;186:844-849. Epub 2011 Jul 23).

San Antonio, TX—In a randomized phase 2 study of patients with metastatic breast cancer, peripheral neuropathy was less likely to occur in patients receiving eribulin mesylate than with ixabepilone.

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.

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.