CancerNetwork®’s Week in Review: July 5th, 2021

Each Monday, CancerNetwork® highlights the most important content from the previous week in oncology news.

This week, the recap is headlined by an article investigating the differences in genetic risk for breast cancer in Black and non-Hispanic White women. Then, a pair of thought leaders share their thoughts on research presented at the 2021 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting.

Black and non-Hispanic White Women Found to Have No Differences in Genetic Risk for Breast Cancer

Differences in frequency of germline pathogenic variants were not seen in patient subsets by ethnicity when comparing 12 genes linked with breast cancer.

“At a time when Black men and women are more likely to be diagnosed with cancer at later stages when it is less treatable, [the Black & BRCA initiative] seeks to empower people to understand their family health history and take action to prevent cancer from one generation to the next,” said first author Susan Domchek, MD, executive director of the Basser Center for BRCA.

Navigating an Optimal Treatment Course for Advanced Kidney Cancer

Benjamin A. Teply, MD, considers the optimal treatment of renal cell carcinoma in a peer perspective accompanying an article by Tiffany Y. Shaw, MD, and colleagues.

A remarkable sea change has occurred over the past 3-plus years, as the results of 5 separate positive phase 3 studies have demonstrated superiority of immunotherapy-containing regimens over monotherapy with the anti-VEGF tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) sunitinib (Sutent) in the first-line setting.

Neal D. Shore, MD, on the Importance of Multidisciplinary Care in Advanced Prostate Cancer

At the 2021 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, CancerNetwork® spoke with Neal D. Shore, MD, FACS, regarding the importance of multidisciplinary care for patients with advanced prostate cancer.

Incorporating a multidisciplinary approach for patients with advanced prostate cancer is essential in order to provide patients with further therapeutic benefit and improve quality of life.

Friendly Competition Fosters Progress in Hematologic Malignancies

With options for transplant, chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, tyrosine kinase inhibitors, and immunotherapy in most tumor types, appropriate therapy selection for a given patient is far from straightforward or standard.

To discuss this and emerging breakthroughs, Elias Jabbour, MD, a professor of medicine in the Department of Leukemia, Division of Cancer Medicine, at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, reflected on his body of work and how competition among colleagues motivated his contributions to the field of medicine.

Stephen Liu, MD, on How Targeted Therapy Results in Significant Efficacy for RET-Altered Tumors

CancerNetwork® sat down with Stephen Liu, MD, of the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center in Washington, DC, at the 2021 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, to discuss what multidisciplinary providers can learn from outcomes of the phase 2 ARROW trial (NCT03037385) of pralsetinib in patients with RET fusion­–positive non–small cell lung cancer.

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