ASCO 2015 Highlights

Gastric cancer and lung cancer impose a substantial burden on patients. In light of the high mortality rate and quality-of-life issues associated with these 2 types of cancer, there is a marked need for additional therapeutic options to improve outcomes for patients with gastric or lung cancer.

Timothy Sherwood, MD, the thoracic surgeon who was featured in Part 2 of this series, referred Alberta Hickman for prehabilitation before operating on her after she was diagnosed with lung cancer. Alberta received her care at Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg, VA, which recently adopted the STAR Program, a best practices cancer rehabilitation model of care. The medical team published Alberta’s story as a case report, because she did so well and her physical function improved after surgery compared with her baseline status before the operation. Moreover, she had a shorter-than-usual hospital length of stay for this type of surgery. This is Alberta’s perspective about cancer prehabilitation in her own words.

San Antonio, TX—Adding an erythropoiesis-stimulating agent (ESA) to best supportive care failed to demonstrate noninferiority for progression-free survival (PFS) compared with best supportive care alone in patients with metastatic breast cancer, in a clinical trial known as EPO-ANE-3010 that was requested by the FDA.

San Antonio, TX—Results of a new nutrition study show that women who reduced their intake of dietary fat for 5 years after being diagnosed with early breast cancer had significantly lower rates of death from all causes compared with controls, at 15 years of follow-up; this reduction was seen specifically in women with hormone receptor (HR)-­negative breast cancer. No long-term effect of dietary fat reduction on mortality was observed in women with HR-positive breast cancer. The results of the study, called Women’s Intervention Nutrition Study (WINS), were presented at the 2014 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Disease progression is slower and overall survival (OS) is greater in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) who are being monitored for their response to tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) therapy and show good adherence. However, few clinicians monitor response and adherence to oral TKI treatment in patients with CML.

An investigational first-in-class ­anticancer quinolone derivative, vosaroxin, extended median over­­all survival (OS) when used with cytarabine (Cytosar-U) in a phase 3 clinical trial of patients with relapsed or refrac­­tory acute myeloid leukemia (AML), although the difference was not significant.

San Francisco, CA—In patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), assessment of minimal residual disease (MRD) is increasingly used to evaluate response to treatment. An antibody that recruits the body’s T-cells to attack MRD in patients with ALL whose disease is in remission can prevent full relapse.

Screening for cancer is suboptimal among some immigrant populations, especially those whose primary care physicians are trained in foreign countries, according to results of a new study of primary care practices in Canada; specifically, women from South Asia whose family physicians were trained in South Asia were less likely to be screened for cervical cancer than nonimmigrant women whose physicians were not immigrants.