Wayne Kuznar
Authored Items
Chicago, IL—Tumor-specific antigens provide personalized targets for immunotherapy. Neoantigen vaccines are a new type of immunotherapy that can elicit immune response and achieve remission. Evidence is compelling to support neoantigens as the target of effective immune responses against cancer and to support an association between neoantigen load with improved clinical outcome, said Patrick Alexander Ott, MD, PhD, Clinical Director, Center for Immuno-Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA, at ASCO 2019.
Read More ›At the 2018 NCCN conference, Sharon H. Giordano, MD, MPH, FASCO, Professor of Medicine, Department of Breast Medical Oncology, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, provided an update on the treatment of patients with HER2-positive breast cancer, noting an “explosion of new therapies” in recent years that have had a tremendous impact on survival.
Read More ›A starting dose of regorafenib (Stivarga) 80 mg daily with dose escalation to 160 mg daily was better tolerated than starting at 160 mg daily, with a trend toward improved survival in the management of patients with metastatic colorectal cancer.
Read More ›The combination cohort consisted of 119 patients who received nivolumab 3 mg/kg plus ipilimumab 1 mg/kg every 3 weeks for 4 doses followed by nivolumab 3 mg/kg every 2 weeks. The median follow-up was 13.4 months.
Read More ›New data from an interim analysis of the head-to-head, open-label, phase 3, Japanese study J-ALEX, show that alectinib (Alecensa) significantly improved progression-free survival (PFS) compared with crizotinib (Xalkori) in the frontline setting, according to Hiroshi Nokihara, MD, PhD, of the National Cancer Center Hospital, Tokyo, Japan.
Read More ›The surprising results of a randomized trial on patient preference for one cancer therapy over another show that patient-reported quality-of-life (QOL) differences influence treatment preference far more than physicians had imagined, suggested researchers at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, held in Chicago, Illinois.
Read More ›CHICAGO—Most end-of-life costs ac - crued by patients with cancer are related to health services rather than the use of drugs, according to an analysis of claims from a large health plan (UnitedHealth).
“The bottom line is that most of the costs were not related to drugs but to healthcare services plus the inpatient hospitalizations,” said April Teitelbaum, MD, coinvestigator and a practicing oncologist and Senior Medical Director, Life Sciences, Hematology/ Oncology, Innovus, Eden Prairie, Minnesota.
Read More ›CHICAGO—Decitabine extends overall survival and improves response rates compared with standard therapies in the treatment of older patients with newly diagnosed acute myelogenous leukemia (AML), said Xavier G. Thomas, MD, PhD.
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ANAHEIM—Effective management of breakthrough cancer pain requires optimizing background therapy for chronic pain and accurately assessing the type of breakthrough pain, said presenters at the 45th American Society of Health-System Pharmacists Midyear Clinical Meeting & Exposition.
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ANAHEIM—Hypersensitivity or infusion reactions to chemotherapy agents or monoclonal antibodies can be lifethreatening but often can be managed with premedications or titration of infusion rates, said Catherine Christen, PharmD, at the 45th American Society of Health-System Pharmacists Midyear Clinical Meeting & Exposition.
Medications associated with infusion reactions are platinum agents, taxanes, liposomal doxorubicin, etoposide, and monoclonal antibodies. Hypersensitivity reactions can be either allergic (IgE-mediated) or nonallergic (anaphylactoid).
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ANAHEIM—Hypersensitivity or infusion reactions to chemotherapy agents or monoclonal antibodies can be life-threatening but often can be managed with premedications or titration of infusion rates to allow continuance of therapy, said Catherine Christen, PharmD, at the 45th American Society of Health-System Pharmacists Midyear Clinical Meeting & Exposition.
Read More ›ANAHEIM—Antibiotics are being delayed in patients with febrile neutropenia, found George Varughese, PharmD.
After a patient is diagnosed with neutropenia, guidelines from the Infectious Diseases Society of America recommend prompt initiation of an antibiotic. “Ideally, prompt is considered to be administration in less than 1 hour,” said Varughese, a pharmacy resident at the University Hospital-Health Alliance of Greater Cincinnati at the University of Cincinnati at the time the study was conducted.
Read More ›ANAHEIM—Pharmacist assessment of palonosetron use for the prevention of emesis associated with chemotherapy has the potential to capture inappropriate use and result in cost savings, said John P. Jezak, PharmD.
Read More ›ANAHEIM—Overweight as well as obese chemo therapy recipients who are dosed according to total body weight do not experience more adverse drug events or cycle delays than normal weight recipients.
The finding, which comes from a 10-year retrospective analysis of patients with gastrointestinal (GI) cancers, should allay concerns about overdosing and the potential for increased toxicities when calculating the chemotherapy dose using total body weight, said lead investigator Tiffany Dea, PharmD.
Read More ›ANAHEIM—A new process for handling oral chemotherapy medications that delineates prescriber privileges may help to avert errors or drug–drug interactions, said Brian L’Heureux, PharmD.
On August 1, 2010, at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, a new procedure for processing oncology orders was implemented, said L’Heureux, an oncology pharmacy resident.
Under the new system, oncologyspecific medications have to be ordered by prescribers with delineated privileges using a specific chemotherapy order form.
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