Bryant Furlow

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s experience shows that selected patients with low-risk papillary thyroid cancer can safely defer surgery in favor of active surveillance.

Dual inhibition of PI3K signaling and histone deacetylase 2 (HDAC2) enzymes with CUDC-907 slowed thyroid tumor cell proliferation, tumor progression and metastasis, according to a preclinical study.

Mitochondrial glycerophosphate dehydrogenase (mGPDH) is overexpressed in differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC) tissue, and metformin, which downregulates mGPDH, is associated with slowed growth in metastatic DTC tumors in mice.

The risk of immunotherapy-related destructive thyroiditis requires close patient monitoring and can cause permanent hypothyroidism.

Five years after treatment, low-dose postsurgical radioiodine (I-131) ablation for low-risk thyroid cancer offers outcomes equivalent to those seen following higher-dose ablation, according to a long-term follow-up analysis by French researchers.

A MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry (MassARRAY) mutation-detection panel shows promise for improving the presurgical diagnosis of thyroid cancers with fine needle aspirations, according to a pilot study.

High-risk ultrasound findings strongly indicate that thyroid nodules are malignant, even when nodules are cytologically indeterminate following find needle aspiration.

A live attenuated bioengineered bacteria-vectored vaccine immunotherapy is well tolerated and appears to be associated with promising overall survival among women with persistent/recurrent metastatic cervical cancer.

Experimental, minimally invasive “liquid biopsy” blood tests might soon help to personalize prostate cancer treatment by predicting androgen resistance and survival benefits from particular treatments.

Adding carboplatin to cabazitaxel was safe and associated with improved PFS among men with aggressive variant castration-resistant prostate cancer.

Despite hematologic toxicities and port-related adverse events, IP carboplatin plus IV dose-dense paclitaxel appears to be effective in patients with suboptimally debulked epithelial ovarian or primary peritoneal carcinoma.

Pembrolizumab is well-tolerated and shows promising antitumor activity and early survival rates among patients with PD-L1–positive cervical squamous cell cancer, according to preliminary results of the KEYNOTE-028 trial.

Extending platinum-free interval with pegylated liposomal doxorubicin, topotecan, or gemcitabine does not improve overall survival among patients with recurrent ovarian cancer.

Baseline quality of life measures predict early cessation of chemotherapy and overall survival in women with platinum-resistant/refractory, recurrent ovarian cancer.

Post-treatment CT surveillance does not offer better survival rates vs clinical symptoms evaluation for tumor recurrence in locally advanced non–small-cell lung cancer.

Adding metformin to a combination of everolimus plus letrozole for women with advanced or recurrent endometrioid endometrial cancer might offer clinical benefits.

Combined therapy with gemcitabine and pazopanib appears to be a viable treatment option for patients with soft-tissue sarcomas refractory to anthracycline or ifosfamide.

Hormone maintenance therapy is associated with better survival than post-treatment surveillance for women with low-grade serous carcinoma of the ovary or peritoneum.

Busulfan/melphalan high-dose chemotherapy consolidation is associated with better survival vs VAI among patients with localized high-risk Ewing sarcoma.

Regorafenib is associated with improved progression-free survival in pretreated patients with advanced refractory non-liposarcoma soft-tissue sarcomas.

A targeted-sequencing gene panel that includes EGFR, KRAS, PIK3CA, and other mutations from circulating tumor DNA detects stage I non–small-cell lung cancer and might outperform existing tumor markers.

Elderly patients with stage III non–small-cell lung cancer experience poorer overall survival than patients younger than age 70 years when treated with standard concurrent chemoradiotherapy, according to a pooled analysis.

Matching targeted therapies to genetic abnormalities harbored by tumor types for which those therapies are not approved by the FDA might expand treatment options for some patients with advanced cancers.

Among women previously treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy followed by debulking surgery for advanced epithelial ovarian cancer, adding intraperitoneal to intravenous administration of postsurgical chemotherapy appears to be associated with a lower rate of disease progression.

Directly engaging and recruiting patients online using social media will allow broader participation in cancer genomics research and hasten clinical advances.

The investigational biosimilar MYL-1401O has comparable efficacy and safety to the FDA-approved trastuzumab in metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer.

Adjuvant temozolomide chemotherapy following radiotherapy improves survival among patients with anaplastic gliomas that do not harbor 1p/19q co-deletions, according to interim results from a phase III trial.

Dental exams and procedures should occur before treatment begins for patients with head and neck cancer and other malignancies, and post-treatment dental follow-up care should be life-long for cancer survivors.

Blood transfusions play a key role in managing complications of acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL), involving unique blood product strategies.

Working with Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy!-winning computer, oncologists are developing new supercomputing tools for treatment decision support.