Mary Caffrey

Miruna Sasu, PhD, MBA, president and CEO of COTA Healthcare, discusses the medicines discovery process and how real-world data can be used to evaluate patient and tumor response to treatment regimens.

Miruna Sasu, PhD, MBA, president and CEO of COTA Healthcare, delves into how real-world data and evidence generation have changed, both within the past year and since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Debra Patt, MD, PhD, MBA, executive vice president of Texas Oncology, discusses how community oncology practices have heightened their outreach efforts to entice patients back in for cancer screenings and the importance of thinking outside the box to overcome staffing shortages in the oncology space.

Cholangiocarcinoma (CCA), or bile duct cancer, is classified by its location, with intrahepatic CCA (iCCA) referring to those cancers that form in bile ducts within the liver.

Officials from Novartis emphasized that the ribociclib-fulvestrant combination is the only one in the CDK4/6 inhibitor class to demonstrate an overall survival benefit when used in a first-line setting among postmenopausal women.

Patients with type 2 diabetes who used the Omnipod 5 had lower A1C after 8 weeks. Those who had been using multiple daily injections achieved the greatest benefits in reduced hypoglycemia and reduced insulin use.

The project seeks to develop materials explaining chemotherapy regimens for patients with biliary tract cancers and then translate these materials into “standardized, high-quality, free, and easily accessible resources."

Debra Patt, MD, PhD, MBA, executive vice president of Texas Oncology, addresses how the pandemic may have influenced cancer screening and diagnosis rates.

Joseph Alvarnas, MD, vice president of government affairs at City of Hope and chief clinical adviser of AccessHope in Duarte, California, spoke March 4 at the closing session of the Association for Community Cancer Centers (ACCC) Annual Meeting & Cancer Business Summit in Washington, DC.

Debra Patt, MD, PhD, MBA, executive vice president of Texas Oncology, addresses considerations for getting a second COVID-19 booster, or a fourth dose, among survivors of breast cancer or patients currently undergoing treatment as well as those who may be immunocompromised.

The study used rats with monocrotaline (MCT)-induced PAH to examine whether adding dapagliflozin, a sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitor, would offer any add-on benefit when used with sildenafil.

Coverage from the Community Oncology Alliance 2022 Community Oncology Conference, held March 17-18 in Kissimmee, Florida.

Coverage from the Association of Community Cancer Centers 2022 Annual Meeting and Cancer Center Business Summit, held in Washington, DC, March 2-4.

Coverage from the 2022 annual meeting of the Cholangiocarcinoma Foundation, which met February 23-25 in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Accenture’s 2021 report, “The Future Is Now: How to Drive Precision Oncology Adoption," adds to the chorus calling for greater sharing of data and improved standardization, so that academic centers and community practices alike can continually improve data sets used worldwide.

Across OneOncology, says Edward Arrowsmith MD, MPH, clinical pathways offer a vehicle for physicians to agree on best practices and to implement them across the network. Early this year, Arrowsmith became medical director for Clinical Pathways, OneOncology.

Researchers presented results for ZB131, a monoclonal antibody that would target cancer-specific plectin (CSP); experiments with mice showed this may be present in more than 80% of the most common types of cholangiocarcinoma.

Camille Hertzka, vice president, head of oncology, US Medical, AstraZeneca, clarifies testing for the HRR mutation in metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) and the predictive importance of radiographic progression-free survival (rPFS) for overall survival in this setting.

The authors found that the relationship between immunosuppressive cells and effector T cells in hilar and distal cholangiocarcinoma has important implications for treatment, in that the tumor microenvironment would likely need to be primed for a treatment strategy to be effective.

Norman E. “Ned” Sharpless, MD, is departing shortly after the launch of Cancer Moonshot 2.0, an initiative that aims to reduce the cancer death rate by at least half over the next 25 years while improving the experience for all those affected by cancer.

Debra Patt, MD, PhD, MBA, executive vice president of Texas Oncology, explains recommendations for annual mammography screenings after COVID-19 vaccination and why guidelines differ for diagnostic visits.

Many oncologists oppose white bagging because they prefer to be able to adjust doses during a visit based on lab reports taken that day.

Whether a patient is refractory to initial treatment dictates the future course of care.

The expanded use of axi-cel, sold as Yescarta, while not unexpected, nonetheless represents uncharted territory in cancer care.

Camille Hertzka, vice president, head of oncology, US Medical, AstraZeneca, discusses why so much excitement has been generated for the use of olaparib (Lynparza) in the first line for patients with metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer.

From taking part in clinical research at a local location to foregoing aggressive therapy in favor of quality of life, patients with cancer are seeking new options, said panelists at the 2022 Annual Conference of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN).

The authors say delivering FOLFOX via transarterial infusion could be a “perfect option for treating intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma before patients receive targeted therapy, immunotherapy, or radiotherapy.

The study by the Veneto Institute of Oncology (IOV) in Padua, Italy, examined 286 patients for genomic mutations in cholangiocarcinoma as well as survival status.

A recommendation to test for the mutation aligns with calls to identify biomarkers in cholangiocarcinoma to guide treatment.

Quality measures are the lifeblood of practice transformation, but learning which ones make a difference—and how to use them to drive change—is as much an art as a science, according to 3 oncology care leaders who discussed the topic Friday at the 2022 Community Oncology Conference, presented by the Community Oncology Alliance.