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American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting (AACR)

Multidisciplinary care teams are an important aspect of patient-centered care and are slowly become more common place at community cancer centers. For those working at smaller hospitals or centers, it is important to use every type of resource available and in a lot of cases those resources include the nonclinical care force including family members, clergy, and volunteers.

In 2011, the American College of Surgeons Commission on Cancer announced several new patient-centered standards that were designed to ensure that key elements of quality cancer care are provided to every person with cancer treated at an accredited facility.

Washington, DC-“Triple-negative breast tumors are composed of mosaic cancer cells with distinct genetic aberrations,” said Jorge S. Reis-Filho, MD, PhD, a surgical pathologist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who combines traditional pathology, gene expression profiling, and genomics techniques to understand rare breast tumor types, including triple-negative diseases.

In this interview, ahead of the AACR annual meeting, we speak with Dr. Julie Brahmer, of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who is giving a presentation on immunotherapy in lung cancer, and is one of the clinical investigators of the extensive phase I trial of the anti–PD-1 antibody nivolumab.

Leaders of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) have expressed deep concern that the ability of cancer researchers to bring the promise of science to improve outcomes for cancer patients in the United States is in peril due to a decade of declining budgets at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).