Nearly 50% of cancer survivors are undertreated for chronic pain, a condition which negatively impacts cancer-related outcomes, physical function, and quality of life. Due to the challenges of the opioid crisis, non-pharmacologic alternatives for pain management in cancer survivors are greatly needed. In the randomized PEACE trial, results of which were recently published in JAMA Oncology, investigators found that patients receiving electroacupuncture and auricular acupuncture experienced signif...

When patients with hematological malignancies do not receive referrals for hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT), they may face a risk of poorer outcomes. Common reasons behind this lack of referrals include provider confusion over eligibility criteria for HSCT, overestimation of the risks associated with transplant, and confusion regarding the benefit of HSCT. This educational gap regarding the uses and risks of HSCT was identified in the baseline data collected from i3 Health's continuing ...

Results from a phase 3 trial of patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma (RCC) presented this week at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Genitourinary Cancers Symposium and simultaneously published in The New England Journal of Medicine demonstrated that the first-line treatment regimen of lenvatinib, a vascular endothelial growth factor receptor (VEGFR) tyrosine kinase inhibitor, plus pembrolizumab, an anti–programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) monoclonal antibody, lengthened ...

The FDA has granted accelerated approval to tepotinib (Tepmetko®, EMD Serono) for patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with mesenchymal-epithelial transition (MET) exon 14 skipping alterations. "A splice-site mutation that results in a loss of transcription of exon 14 in the oncogenic driver MET occurs in 3% to 4% of patients with NSCLC," wrote the investigators of the phase 2 VISION trial (NCT02864992) in their September publication in The New England Journal of Medicine,...

The FDA has approved FoundationOne® CDx (Foundation Medicine, Inc.) as a companion diagnostic device to identify neurotrophic receptor tyrosine kinase (NTRK) fusions in patients with solid tumors in order to determine eligibility for treatment with larotrectinib (Vitrakvi®, Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals, Inc.). FoundationOne is a next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based in vitro diagnostic device previously approved to determine eligibility for more than 20 other FDA-approved targeted therapies...