The March issue of The Oncology Pharmacist (TOP) contains important news for today’s oncology pharmacist, including potentially practice-changing data presented at national and international conferences, which highlight the advances being made in the treatment of a wide range of cancers, as well as a roundup of recently published research from medical professionals who are striving to make cancer care more accessible and affordable for patients and more cost-effective for the healthcare system.
To begin this issue, we feature coverage of some the key presentations made during the 2023 American Society of Clinical Oncology Genitourinary Cancers Symposium. The theme of the symposium, “Today’s Science, Tomorrow’s Treatment,” reflected the progress being made across the spectrum of genitourinary malignancies via new therapeutic strategies and the approval of more effective agents, which are resulting in improved survival rates and overall patient outcomes.
In his keynote address, titled “Ending Cancer as We Know It: Predicting Future Cancer Progress,” Norman E. Sharpless, MD, Former Director of the National Cancer Institute, discussed evidence of this progress, as well as some of the obstacles that will need to be overcome to build upon recent successes (see here).
In this issue, you can also read about encouraging findings from the recent POSITIVE clinical trial of premenopausal women with early-stage, hormone receptor–positive breast cancer who desired to pause endocrine therapy to pursue pregnancy. Results showed that these women could temporarily stop their therapy for up to 2 years as they tried to conceive without increasing the risk for a recurrence in the short term (see here).
“These data will change the way I counsel patients, because prospective data are very reassuring and will make us more comfortable supporting patients to pursue this approach, especially for lower risk patients,” said Ann Partridge, MD, MPH, one of the lead investigators of the study, who presented these results at the 2022 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.
Other topics of interest in this issue include a discussion pertaining to recent data on long COVID from the Household Pulse Survey (see here), results from a study confirming the cost-savings related to the use of telehealth in cancer care (see here), details from a published analysis that may lead to a more cost-effective screening approach for patients with lung cancer (see here), safety and efficacy data from clinical trials evaluating newer agents and combination regimens being used in the treatment of hematologic malignancies (see here and here), and findings from a study that revealed differences in the way that some healthcare professionals approach the topic of sexual health with their female and male patients (see here).
As in every issue of TOP, we also provide readers with the latest details on new cancer drugs and new indications approved by the FDA.
We hope you will enjoy this issue of TOP, and we invite you to visit www.TheOncologyPharmacist.com to share your feedback about this issue with us or send comments to