To provide a roadmap for accelerating progress against breast cancer over the next 10 years, an expert panel was convened at the 2022 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium to identify the biggest obstacles hindering our ability to cure breast cancer and to propose transformative solutions to address these obstacles.
The majority of epithelial ovarian cancer is diagnosed at an advanced stage and long-term survival is low. Since ovarian cancer screening is ineffective, the main focus to reduce ovarian cancer mortality is prevention.
The National Cancer Institute defines precision medicine in cancer as a strategy that “uses specific information about a person’s tumor to help make a diagnosis, plan treatment, find out how well treatment is working, or make a prognosis.”1
The release of FDA’s draft guidance, “Optimizing the Dosage of Human Prescription Drugs and Biological Products for the Treatment of Oncologic Diseases,” has been greatly anticipated since June 2021, when FDA announced in its accelerated approval of the KRASG12C inhibitor sotorasib that it would require a randomized, controlled trial comparing the efficacy of the labeled dose (960 mg once daily) to a 75% lower dose (240 mg once daily) as a condition of full regulatory approval (The Cancer Letter, June 11, 2021; April 29, 2022).
The American Cancer Society’s Cancer Facts & Figures 2023, released last week, reports that the five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is now 12%, an increase of one percentage point from last year.
Technological advances are transforming our understanding of cancer, accelerating the evolution of new treatment approaches. In the past decades, researchers deploying new techniques for analyzing DNA have extended our knowledge of inherited genetic abnormalities that can predispose a person to develop colorectal and other cancers.
We live in an era of quality monitoring—from the quality of products, like water or refrigerators, to the quality of customer service received from repair technicians, food delivery services, and even customer service representatives. This drive for quality measurement has naturally spread into the world of medicine.
For the past several years, interest in FLASH radiation therapy research has surged in the oncology community.1 It is arguably one of the hottest topics in cancer care today, with the potential to shift the trajectory of treatment in ways that were once only imaginable.
Before the results of the ANal Cancer/HSIL Outcomes Research (ANCHOR) study became available earlier this week, there was no clear reason to screen for the anal cancer precursor, anal high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesions (HSIL).
We wish to applaud the sentiments expressed in the recent article in The Cancer Letter titled “Oncologists, advocates, FDA call for an end to MTD and ‘more is better’ era in cancer drug dosing,” but also raise several concerns to be addressed as this initiative moves forward.
