February 2012, Vol 3, No 1

San Francisco, CA—The novel tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) regorafenib, used as a single agent to treat treatment-refractory metastatic colorectal cancer (CRC), significantly improved survival and delayed disease progression in an international phase 3 trial presented at the 2012 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium.

>San Francisco, CA—The “eradication” of colorectal cancer (CRC) may be a step closer, based on promising data for stool DNA testing, said David A. Ahlquist, MD, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, at the 2012 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium.

I never thought it would happen in the United States, but it has. We are critically close to running out of some chemotherapy drugs. It came as a shock to all of us, when we realized how severely the problem of drug shortages has started to affect our patients. The following case is but one example.

On November 30, 2011, the Office of the Inspector Gen­eral (OIG) of the US Depart­ment of Health and Human Services issued an advisory opinion (No. 11-18) to the web-based physician practice service provider athenahealth, tacitly approving the company’s new online service athenaCoordinator.

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.