An interview with Jean Bourhis MD PhD, Head of Service of radiation oncology, Lausanne University Hospital, Lausanne, Switzerland. And with: Pat Price MD, Imperial College London, UK, Chair, Global Coalition for Radiotherapy. SARAH MAXWELL Disease free survival was extended in patients with head and neck cancers who had Nivolumab added to their standard post-operative therapy. I’m Sarah Maxwell. Welcome to this edition of the Audio Journal of Oncology. Patients with high-risk cancers of the head...
Jul 03, 2025•10 min
Audio Journal of Oncology An interview with: Luis G Paz-Ares MD PhD, Chair of Medical Oncology, Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre, Universitario de Madrid Comment by: Julie R. Gralow MD FACP FASCO, Chief Medical Officer and Executive Vice President, American Society of Clinical Oncology. https://www.audiomedica.com/wp-content/2025/06/Luis-Paz-Ares-PRODUCTION-MASTER-.mp3 CHICAGO, USA—Patients with extensive stage small cell lung cancer had longer disease-free survival and lived longer when the...
Jun 30, 2025•12 min
An interview with: Elena Elez MD PhD, Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain CHICAGO, USA—Adding the BRAF inhibitor encorafenib (partnered with EGFR-inhibitor cetuximab) to standard chemotherapy as initial therapy markedly delayed progression and extended life in patients whose inoperable metastatic colorectal cancers had tested positive for the BRAF V600E (found in around ten per cent of patients). This was in the randomized open label phase three BREAKWATER study reported at the...
Jun 19, 2025•16 min
An interview with: Yelena Y Janjigian MD , Medical Oncologist, Chief of Gastrointestinal Oncology Service, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York USA CHICAGO—A treatment described as “practice-changing”, in which a combination of anti-PD-L1 immunotherapy and chemotherapy was used before and after surgery among patients with resectable gastric or gastroesophageal junction cancers, was reported from the MATTERHORN study at the Plenary Session of the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American So...
Jun 17, 2025•5 min
An interview with: Christopher Booth , MD, FRCPC Medical Oncologist and Professor, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada Comments from: Rebecca Dent MD MSc, Senior Consultant Medical Oncologist, Deputy Chief Executive Officer, National Cancer Centre, Singapore CHICAGO— For patients with stage III and high-risk stage II colon cancer, a structured exercise program following surgery and adjuvant chemotherapy reduced the risk of recurrent or new cancer and increased survival in a study reported at th...
Jun 12, 2025•11 min
An interview with: Frank A Sinicrope, MD, Medical Oncologist, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota. CHICAGO —Big gains in survival have been reported among patients with stage three, node-positive colon cancer whose tumors tested positive for deficient mismatch repair. At the American Society of Clinical Oncology 2025 Annual Meeting Frank Sinicrope reported findings from the phase three ATOMIC trial in which the immune checkpoint inhibitor atezolizumab was added to adjuvant chemotherapy after resec...
Jun 10, 2025•7 min
An interview with: Andy Zeng, MD/PhD candidate, University of Toronto and Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Toronto, Canada With comment from: Hussein A Abbas MD PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Leukemia, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston TX CHICAGO—A research study using single-cell RNA sequencing data has created a new gene expression atlas that shows how normal hematopoietic cells differentiate. Findings reported at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Associatio...
May 22, 2025•15 min
An interview with: Yelena Y Janjigian MD, Medical Oncologist, Chief of Gastrointestinal Oncology Service, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York. CHICAGO, USA—Patients with early-stage solid cancers with DNA mismatch repair-deficiency (also known as microsatellite instability) benefitted greatly if they received anti-programmed death-1 (PD-1) immunotherapy with pembrolizumab after surgery and standard of care if they tested positive for circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA). These findings com...
May 13, 2025•10 min
The Audio Journal of Oncology talks with: Paolo Marchetti MD, Scientific Director, Istituto Dermatopatico dell’Immacolata, Rome And with: Elaine R. Mardis , PhD FAACR, Co-Executive Director of the Steve and Cindy Rasmussen Institute for Genomic Medicine, Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Rasmussen Nationwide Foundation Endowed Chair in Genomic Medicine, Professor of Pediatrics, Ohio State University College of Medicine, Columbus OH, USA. CHICAGO, USA—Using a combination of tissue biopsy together w...
May 09, 2025•10 min
An Interview with: Stephen Strickland , Jr. MD MSCI, Director, Leukemia Research; Executive Chair, Leukemia Research Committee, Sarah Cannon Research Instiute, Nashville, Tennessee USA CHICAGO – Several patients with acute myeloid leukemia, who were treated with SENTI-202, a first-in-class chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) natural killer (NK) cell therapy, experienced complete remission after not responding to (or having relapsed following) prior treatments, according to interim results from the p...
May 08, 2025•14 min
An interview with: Adetunji T. Toriola, MD, PhD, MPH, Professor of Surgery, Department of Surgery and Division of Public Health Sciences, Washington University School of Medicine and Siteman Cancer Center, St Louis, Missouri, USA And with: Elaine R. Mardis, PhD FAACR, Co-executive director of the Steve and Cindy Rasmussen Institute for Genomic Medicine, Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Rasmussen Nationwide Foundation Endowed Chair in Genomic Medicine, Professor of Pediatrics, Ohio State Universit...
May 07, 2025•15 min
An interview with: Adam Thiesen, PhD Candidate, UConn Health, University of Connecticut and the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine, Farmington, CT And with: Jayesh Desai MD, Medical Oncologist, Associate Director Clinical Research, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Melbourne, Australia, Co-Chair, AACR Clinical Committee. CHICAGO – An artificial intelligence-based model accurately classified pediatric sarcomas using histopathology images alone, according to study conclusions reported to the Ame...
May 06, 2025•16 min
An interview with: John V Heymach MD PhD, Professor and Chair of Thoracic/Head and Neck Medical Oncology, Ruth Legett Jones Distinguished Chair, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston TX And with: Jayesh Desai MD, Medical Oncologist, Associate Director Clinical Research, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Melbourne, Australia, Co-Chair, AACR Clinical Committee. CHICAGO, USA—A safer way of targeting tumors with mutated human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) in patients with p...
May 04, 2025•13 min
An interview with: Andrea Cercek MD, Gastrointestinal Cancer Medical Oncologist, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York And: Ryan B Corcoran MD PhD, Director of the GI Cancer Program, Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, Boston MA CHICAGO—The Audio Journal of Oncology reports on the neoadjuvant use of programmed cell-death protein 1 (PD-1) immune checkpoint inhibition to give patients whose resectable colorectal cancers express mismatch repair deficiency the option of avoiding...
May 03, 2025•14 min
An interview with: Anisha B Patel MD, Associate Professor of Dermatology, Division of Internal Medicine, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston TX CHICAGO, USA—Acneiform rash toxicities caused by anti- epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) therapies were markedly reduced among patients with colorectal cancer in a double-blind placebo-controlled, randomized phase two clinical trial that assessed the efficacy of a topical BRAF inhibitor gel designed to treat these skin lesions without affecting canc...
May 02, 2025•9 min
Interviews with: Ravindra Uppaluri, MD PhD, Director of Head and Neck Surgical Oncology, Dana Farber Brigham Cancer Center, Boston MA; And: Ryan B Corcoran MD PhD, Director of the gastrointestinal cancer program, Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, Associate Professor of Medicine Harvard Medical School and Co-Chair of the American Association for Cancer Research Clinical Trials Committee. CHICAGO, USA—Perioperative immunotherapy, using the PD-1 blocker pembrolizumab both before and aft...
May 01, 2025•13 min
An interview with: Kathryn C Arbour MD, Thoracic Medical Oncologist, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York USA And: Ryan B Corcoran MD PhD, Massachusetts General Cancer Center, Associate Professor of Medicine Harvard Medical School, Co-Chair, American Association for Cancer Research Clinical Trials Committee CHICAGO, USA— The four per cent of patients with previously treated non-small cell lung cancer whose tumors harbor a KRAS G12D mutation may soon have an effective targeted treatme...
Apr 30, 2025•12 min
An interview with: Jiafu Ji MD PhD DrPH FRCS, Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Medical Science, Professor and Chief, Gastrointestinal Cancer Center, Peking University Cancer Hospital, Beijing Institute for Cancer Research, Beijing, China Sarah Maxwell , Audio Journal of Oncology : The idea of harnessing two different pathways of checkpoint inhibition simultaneously is very appealing for the treatment of high-risk gastric cancers. But a research team in China, proposed that, blocking both the PD-...
Apr 23, 2025•10 min
An interview with: Ajay Goel PhD, Chair of the Molecular Diagnostics and Experimental Therapeutics Department, Beckman Research Institute, City of Hope, Los Angeles California. SAN DIEGO—The prospect of detecting pancreatic cancer at very early stages, when cure may be possible, is now being held out by research showing that the sub-cellular molecules called “exosomes” (shed into the bloodstream by cancer cells) can be analyzed to get very early diagnosis of the disease. Study results using liqu...
Apr 10, 2025•13 min
An interview with: Sundar Jagannath MBBS, Professor of Medicine, Hematology and Medical Oncology, Director of the Center of Excellence for Multiple Myeloma, Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai, New York. Sarah Maxwell, Audio Journal of Oncology: “An exciting, new immunotherapy treatment for multiple myeloma, was under discussion at the 2024 American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting, held in San Diego. It was with a drug that targets not one but two cells to fight the disease. The...
Apr 09, 2025•16 min
An interview with: Olivier Lantz MD PhD, Head of the Clinical Immunology Laboratory, Institut Curie, Paris, France PARIS, France—A clinical trial using a personalized therapeutic vaccine, that recognizes multiple genetic features of each patient’s tumor, brought durable tumor-specific immune responses in patients with surgically resected HPV-negative head and neck squamous cell cancers, and also prevented relapse in some patients. At the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer...
Apr 09, 2025•14 min
SAN ANTONIO, USA—Women with hormone receptor positive HER-2 negative breast cancer and Oncotype DX recurrence scores above 31 could benefit from having anthracycline therapy added to their taxane-based chemotherapy, according to breast medical oncologist and assistant professor of internal medicine, Nan Chen MD, from the University of Chicago. She reported her group’s latest analysis of records from 2,528 patients in the TAILORx trial at the 2024 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium comparing pat...
Mar 28, 2025•8 min
SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Adding the poly ADP ribose polymerase (PARP) inhibitor drug talazoparib to standard anti-androgen therapy with enzalutamide statistically significantly extended overall survival among patients whose metastatic castration resistant prostate cancers had specific molecular markers. This finding was reported at the 2025 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Genitourinary Cancers Symposium held in San Francisco from the TALAPRO-2 phase three clinical trial investigating patie...
Mar 13, 2025•22 min
Audio Journal of Oncology Patients with Desmoplastic Melanoma Were Exceptional Responders to Single Agent Pembrolizumab LOS ANGELES, CA—Single agent immunotherapy with the anti-programmed death-1 (PD-1) agent pembrolizumab resulted in markedly high melanoma-specific survival rates among patients with either resectable or metastatic desmoplastic melanoma in a study reported to the American Association for Cancer Research 2025 Immno Oncology conference. Lead researcher Kari L Kendra MD PhD, Direct...
Mar 11, 2025•14 min
Bilateral Mastectomy and Salpingo-Oophorectomy Significantly Extend Survival In BRCA-mutation Carriers Who Already Have Breast Cancer The important question of whether to recommend risk-reducing surgery to patients who are carriers of pathogenic mutations in either BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes (or both), and have already developed breast cancer, has been investigated in a study from Italy reported at the 2025 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. Researcher Matteo Lambertini MD PhD, from the University o...
Feb 26, 2025•13 min
SAN ANTONIO, USA—In patients with hormone receptor-positive, HER2-negative, low-risk ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) active monitoring, compared with surgery, resulted in no difference in terms of cancer outcomes in the multicenter, randomized COMET study that compared oncologic outcomes of patients randomized to guideline-concordant care (with surgery alone or with radiation therapy) or active monitoring. COMET investigated 995 patients with grade one or two DCIS with no evidence of invasive ca...
Jan 16, 2025•14 min
SAN ANTONIO, USA—There was no benefit from chest wall irradiation in patients who had intermediate-risk breast cancer, according to findings reported at the 2024 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium from the BIG 2-04 MRC SUPREMO international phase three randomized controlled trial. At the conference Ian Kunkler MA, MB, BChir, Professor at Edinburgh Cancer Centre in the Western General Hospital, University of Edinburgh, Scotland UK, told the conference that after investigating the impact of adjuv...
Jan 11, 2025•15 min
An interview with: Jenny Paredes PhD, of the Department of Hematology and Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation at City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California SAN DIEGO, USA—A higher intake of dietary fiber after allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation was associated with increased overall survival, a lower incidence of graft-versus-host disease, an increase in fecal concentrations of beneficial short-chain fatty acids and greater microbial diversity of the gut microbiome. Thes...
Jan 08, 2025•12 min
SAN DIEGO, USA—When added to standard chemotherapy the bi-specific T-cell engager drug blinatumomab brought a large, statistically significant improvement in disease-free survival in a randomized controlled study of 1731 children with average or higher relapse-risk B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Study first author Rachel E. Rau MD, from the Seattle Children’s Hospital, University of Washington, in the USA, reported her group’s findings at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Society of ...
Dec 17, 2024•13 min
SAN DIEGO, USA—When added to standard chemotherapy the bi-specific T-cell engager drug blinatumomab brought a large, statistically significant improvement in disease-free survival in a randomized controlled study of 1731 children with average or higher relapse-risk B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Study first author Rachel E. Rau MD, from the Seattle Children’s Hospital, University of Washington, in the USA, reported her group’s findings at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Society of ...
Dec 17, 2024•13 min
