I’ve been involved in a wide range of discussions, both here and in my own clinical, about the fairly common situation of how to approach a situation in which the story on paper and what you see actually happening are incompatible. For instance, last week I and several of my colleagues participated in a […]
0 CommentsOne of the abstracts in lung cancer that I noted as being particularly noteworthy before ASCO 2008, but which I haven’t managed to mention since, is a trial of a monoclonal antibody known as CP-751,871 that targets and inhibits insulin-like growth factor receptor-1(IGF-1R), a molecule that appears to be involved with cell growth, balance […]
5 CommentsRosetta Genomics today issued a press release that described their new test that received regulatory approval in New York state as a method of discriminating whether a lung cancer is squamous or non-squamous cancer. Rosetta Genomics is based in Israel, and this particular test was developed in collaboration with researchers at Columbia University Medical […]
0 CommentsIn the past couple of posts we’ve seen that based on evidence from Japan and Rome, number of lymph nodes resected and also the absolute number of positive nodes and/or proportion of positive nodes may be important prognostic variable. A third abstract I reviewed on the same subject came from Peoria, IL, and illustrated […]
2 CommentsIn the last post I discussed some interesting work from a group in Japan that suggested that the number of lymph nodes that are removed and positive for NSCLC may be a very important prognostic variable, potentially an even more important factor than location of the nodes, which is the basis for how we stage nodal involvement in […]
0 CommentsAt this year’s ASCO meeting, I had the opportunity to review and provide commentary on several presentations from other researchers, all on the topic of how to refine our ability to predict how patients will do after surgery for stage I - IIIA NSCLC, with an idea that this information can help guide decisions […]
2 Comments I think one of the most important lead stories from ASCO 2008 got buried. Nobody’s really talking about it yet, but they should.
Amidst the results that led to an arguable role for erbitux and more compelling evidence to move second line chemo to bridge first and second line chemo together, we also received […]
I’ll get back to the storyline of our growing understanding of the differences of individuals based on pharmacogenomics very soon. But I wanted to give people some breaking news that just came out. The first line ESCAPE trial of chemo with the anti-angiogenic and multi-kinase inhibitor nexavar (introductory post here) or placebo is apparently negative […]
8 CommentsI had previously written about a spectrum from pure bronchioloalveolar carcinoma (BAC) to invasive adenocarcinoma in one of my first posts here, but the real credit for this concept goes back to Dr. Masayuki Noguchi from the National Cancer Center Hospital in Tokyo, Japan, who characterized a classification system for peripheral lung adenocarcinomas back […]
1 CommentsAs I’ve mentioned in some prior posts, there is increasing recognition that lung cancer in never-smokers may be a different disease. Some of this has been defined by working backward from treatment results, where we’ve seen that never-smokers are consistently among the greatest beneficiaries of EGFR inhibitor therapies like Iressa or Tarceva. But there […]
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