Clinical

To avoid the toxicities associated with use of chemotherapy, there has been progress in developing and utilizing chemotherapy-free therapies to treat mantle cell lymphoma, said Michael Wang, MD, professor in the Department of Lymphoma and Myeloma at MD Anderson.

Although the pembrolizumab 8 arm of I-SPY2 did not have strong enough results to continue onto phase 3, it does provide some insights and highlights the need for precision medicine to tailor approaches to treatment, said Rita Nanda, MD, associate professor, medicine, The University of Chicago Medicine.

There are new technologies that allow for genetic counseling services through which the provider does not even need to get that involved in the process, said Banu Arun, MD, medical oncologist, Department of Breast Medical Oncology, Division of Cancer Medicine, MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Listening to patient concerns and issues and communicating with them can really help providers keep patients with breast cancer adherent to their hormonal therapies, said Erica Mayer, MD, MPH, assistant professor, medicine, Harvard Medical School.

Rita Nanda, MD, associate professor, medicine, The University of Chicago Medicine, outlines the design of the I-SPY2 clinical trial and what the results have been so far.

Ensuring that prognostic or predictive tests to help make decisions regarding radiation therapy are accurate and clinically validated remains a challenge, said Corey Speers, MD, PhD, assistant professor, radiation oncology, University of Michigan.

More than 7 months after Scott Gottlieb, MD, resigned from his position as FDA commissioner, the Senate confirmed Stephen Hahn, MD, FASTRO, to be the next head of the agency.

The bar for who should get genetic testing for breast cancer keeps getting lowered, and oncologists have to keep informed about which results should trigger a referral for germline testing, said Nadine Tung, MD, director, Cancer Risk and Prevention Program, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and associate professor, medicine, Harvard Medical School.

Using biomarker tests can help personalize care for women with ductal carcinoma in situ and determine the risks of using or not using radiation, said Eileen Rakovitch, MD, MSc, FRCPC, professor, department of radiation oncology, University of Toronto.

Hereditary transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy, which is caused by a genetic variant significantly associated with heart failure in individuals of African descent, is underdiagnosed, according to a new study published in JAMA.

Patients with hematologic malignancies receive less appropriate end-of-life care than patients with solid tumors because of barriers with patients, physicians, and the healthcare system in general, said Adam Olszewski, MD, associate professor of medicine at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.

New research shows that carfilzomib in newly diagnosed patients with multiple myeloma resulted in a higher rate of minimal residual disease negativity compared with usual rates, said C. Ola Landgren, MD, PhD, professor of medicine and chief of the Myeloma Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer.

Symptoms of myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs) have a large impact on quality of life for patients and it is important to be able to link them, said Ruben Mesa, MD, director of UT Health San Antonio MD Anderson Cancer Center.

While there are more novel therapies available to treat chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), there are still unanswered questions about how to use these therapies in sequences, said Lindsey Roeker, MD, clinical fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.