Oncology

In Tuesday night's State of the Union address, President Barack Obama did not spend a lot of time discussing healthcare, but he did highlight medical research and a growing field of medicine by announcing his new Precision Medicine Initiative.

A major technical partner is announced for the long-awaited HIT initiative that will give oncologists a data-derived "second opinion" right from their desktops, with the earliest versions scheduled to come online this year.

Karyl Blaseg, RN, MS, OCN, writes about the important role of patient navigators in preventing healthcare disparities and promoting patient-centered care among cancer patients.

Existing cancer therapies are geared toward massacring tumor cells, but researchers propose a different strategy: subtly hardening cancer cells to prevent them from invading new areas of the body. They devised a way of screening compounds for the desired effect and have identified a compound that shows promise in fighting pancreatic cancer.

For people who have cancer, patient-centered care is particularly important because their life is changing, said Amy Berman, RN, BS, senior program officer at the John A. Hartford Foundation, who also has stage 4 breast cancer.

In it's report, "Clinical Cancer Advances 2015: ASCO's Annual Report on Progress Against Cancer," published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, 4 newly approved treatments for CLL were predicted to have a dramatic impact on patients with the disease.

The study conducted at the Michigan Center for Translational Pathology studied IncRNAs and their role in cancer.

The CEO of Kite Pharma plans to initiate early conversations with insurers, even before the launch of a clinical trial of their experimental drug, to ensure smooth sailing once the product is approved and launched.

Researchers at the University of Maryland are evaluating the value of a person's spit to screen for lung cancer, replacing the traditional and recently recommended CT scan.

A study published in Clinical Cancer Research found that 33% of lung cancer biopsies evaluated had a gain of function amplification in the MET receptor tyrosine kinase.

A new study on the effects of cancer patients' financial burdens suggests that pharmacists can play a role in easing or preventing some of their stress.