Lung Cancer / Mesothelioma
Well, folks, I’m heading half-way around the world to Seoul, Korea, for the World Lung Cancer Conference, in Seoul, Korea. I’ll be on the faculty, speaking at a workshop on clinical trial design with targeted therapies for lung cancer, and then also giving a slide presentation on a small trial I did with an […]
10 Comments The fact is that lung cancer, like many others, is a disease disproportionately affecting older populations, with the median age now in the 69-70 range.
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But our trials in lung cancer only rarely involve patients over 70. This leaves us with serious questions about the best way to treat older and poor performance […]
Staging in lung cancer, as well has two categories, clinical and pathologic. The clinical staging is based on what appears on scans like the CT and PET scan that are now pretty routine parts of the staging workup. Our scans are better than ever before, but some lymph nodes with cancer involvement are not enlarged […]
2 Comments
At the risk of having OncTalk sound like a self-indulgent diary of my daily events, I just wanted to let people know I’m in the San Juan Islands for the weekend, off the Pacific Coast near Seattle, with my family. It’s a fabulous place for a weekend (or much longer) away, but people don’t […]
I recently received a question on the Q&A Forum about the use of cisplatin vs. carboplatin in SCLC. In contrast to the smoldering debate about cisplatin vs. carboplatin in NSCLC that I described in a recent post, there’s been very little study and not as much debate about SCLC. What little I can say […]
2 CommentsToday’s USA Today Opinion/Editorials page features a debate about whether patients with terminally ill patients should be permitted to have greater access to investigational agents. The view of the newspaper staff is here and essentially says that patients who have exhausted the conventional, proven, and FDA-approved treatment opportunities should be allowed considerably greater access, […]
2 CommentsThe question of whether to use cisplatin or carboplatin in our “platinum-based chemotherapy doublets” that are the most common treatment for the first-line treatment of NSCLC has been a smoldering debate in lung cancer for more than a decade. Although at this point carboplatin is by far and away more commonly used than the […]
5 CommentsI’ve recently received some questions about the advantages and disadvantages of maintenance Avastin as a single agent for patients after completion of 6 cycles of first line chemo and avastin together for avastin-eligible patients. While this is generally considered to be a standard of care, many oncologists question whether it should be done. It’s […]
10 CommentsOur tendency in oncology is that once we find a new active drug in cancer, we try to add it to our current standard treatment approach and see if we can do better than what our current standard achieves. More is better. And we knew that the epidermal growth factor receptor inhibitors Iressa and […]
0 CommentsSo far, I’ve only written a few introductory posts on mesothelioma, but there were some interesting presentations at ASCO 2007 about the topic. One described the results of an expanded access protocol (EAP), which is when a company gives free access to a drug that is not yet commercially available (generally in exchange for […]
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