Conference Correspondent

Although transplantation offers cures or durable remissions for malignancies, relapse is a frequent occurrence in many diseases, and remains a major cause of mortality.

Despite significant progress in stem-cell transplantations over the past decade, graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) remains the leading cause of nonrelapse death in this patient population.

Precision medicine con­tinues to transform oncology, and it is not just the treatments that are changing.

According to the re­sults of a recent survey of hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation (HSCT) professionals, burnout is prevalent across all HSCT disciplines, with pharmacists showing the highest rates of burnout and moral distress.

The overtreatment or undertreatment of patients with cancer can have life-or-death implications.

Washington, DC—The combination of nivolumab plus ipilimumab improved survival compared with ipilimumab alone in patients with previously untreated advanced melanoma, according to updated results of the phase 3 CheckMate-067 clinical trial presented at the 2017 meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research. A descriptive analysis suggested that the combination was superior to nivolumab monotherapy, although that was not a prespecified end point of the study.

As new drugs are introduced into the clinic, an active area of research is the identification of biomarkers for response that would inform oncologists about which patients are likely to respond.

Abemaciclib, a cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK)4/6 inhibitor, achieved an objective response in 1 of 5 heavily pretreated patients with metastatic hormone receptor–positive/HER2-negative (HR+/HER2–) breast cancer.

Somatostatin analogs have multiple roles in the treatment of neuroendocrine tumors (NETs), including the management of symptoms of hormone hypersecretion and, more recently, slowing tumor progression.