Last spring, at the end of his sophomore year of college, Jace Ward developed double vision in his left eye. He thought the problem might have been related to a recent car accident. But when doctors investigated, they found a tumor in his brain. After the tumor was discovered, a biopsy showed that Jace had an almost uniformly fatal form of brain cancer called diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), which is usually found in children. “This was my worst nightmare,” Jace said at a recent NCI-sponsored scientific workshop about personal genomic data, where he was a speaker. Jace had been invited to…
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Early detection of cancer greatly increases the likelihood of successful treatment. Despite this, the traditional steps in obtaining a diagnosis are time consuming. Patients will typically need to undergo a series of tests to identify what is causing their symptoms. Medical professionals run these tests all at once in order to receive the results as quickly as possible. However, running a multitude of tests is expensive and time consuming. Many tests will yield negative results while costing hundreds to thousands of dollars. Additionally, these tests can take weeks to generate results, often delaying cancer diagnoses and treatment. Luckily, in an…
The first therapies that target mutated forms of the EGFR protein were approved for use in people with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) more than 15 years ago. Updated results from a large clinical trial now show that one of the newest EGFR-targeted drugs, osimertinib (Tagrisso), is more effective than earlier EGFR-targeted therapies in people whose NSCLC tumors have specific alterations in the EGFR gene. In the trial, dubbed FLAURA, patients with advanced NSCLC who received osimertinib as an initial treatment lived approximately 7 months longer than patients treated with erlotinib (Tarceva) or gefinitib (Iressa). And the survival improvement did not come at the cost of safety; the investigators saw no…
In women with ovarian cancer that has come back after initial treatment, physicians recommend additional surgery in some cases to remove as much of the cancer as possible before starting chemotherapy treatment again. Yet rigorous evidence to support this practice has not been available. Now, results of a large NCI-sponsored clinical trial, GOG-0213, show that this secondary surgery does not improve how long patients with recurrent ovarian cancer live. Indeed, the findings suggest that women who have additional surgery may fare worse than those who do not. “These highly anticipated results call into question our standard practice,” said Yovanni Casablanca, M.D., a gynecologic…
New findings from a clinical trial show that treatment with the immunotherapy drug blinatumomab is superior to standard chemotherapy for children and young adults with high- or intermediate-risk B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL) that has relapsed. Those treated with blinatumomab had longer survival, experienced fewer severe side effects, had a higher rate of undetectable residual disease, and were more likely to proceed to a stem cell transplant. “Our study demonstrates that immunotherapy with blinatumomab is more effective and less toxic than chemotherapy as a bridge to curative bone marrow transplant for children and young adults with very aggressive relapse of…
In some people with non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), treating a single tumor with a mix of cancer therapies can help to shrink, or eliminate, tumors in other parts of the body, findings from a small clinical trial suggest. The approach is called an in situ vaccine because it uses something in the body (in situ)—in this case, an individual tumor—to help create a body-wide immune response. It’s currently being tested in a small clinical trial of patients with slow-growing, or indolent, subtypes of NHL. Initial results from the trial showed that delivering the treatment directly to a single tumor in a patient could create an…
Some children with liver cancer may need less chemotherapy than is typically used to treat the disease, according to results from a phase 3 clinical trial. The study, led by the NCI-supported Children’s Oncology Group, included children and infants with the most common type of childhood liver cancer, hepatoblastoma, whose tumors had been surgically removed when the disease was diagnosed. Such patients subsequently receive chemotherapy to kill any remaining cancer cells. Liver cancer is rare in children, and only about one-third of these patients have tumors that can be removed surgically at the time of diagnosis. Approximately 90% of children whose…
On October 16, 2019, an expert panel convened by the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) released updated guidance and recommendations on the role of physical activity and exercise in cancer prevention and survivorship. The panel was co-chaired by Kathryn Schmitz, Ph.D., M.P.H., of the Department of Public Health Sciences at the Penn State College of Medicine, and Charles Matthews, Ph.D., of NCI’s Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics. The recommendations, as outlined in three related publications, are the products of the panel’s comprehensive review of the scientific evidence on physical activity and cancer. In this conversation, Dr. Schmitz, immediate past-president of…