Commentaries

The recent presentation of the aflibercept data in metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) represents an important advance in the treatment of this disease. Approximately 140,000 patients a year in the United States are diagnosed with colorectal cancer, and about a quarter of those have advanced disease. At present, 6 chemotherapeutic drugs that include... »

In recent years, increasing evidence has shown that older patients with cancer can tolerate standard cancer treatments and that the benefits they derive from those therapies are comparable with the benefits seen in younger patients. Yet despite such progress, some less encouraging trends about cancer care in the elderly persist—for example, that elderly... »

Enough data has accumulated in the past 10 years to show that our older patients not only can tolerate standard chemotherapies and other cancer treatments, but that they often obtain as much benefit as their younger counterparts. Of course, the tolerability of such treatments needs to be carefully evaluated and balanced against the likely therapeutic gains,... »

The advent of a molecularly targeted therapy for melanoma has revolutionized our approach to the evaluation and treatment of this disease. It is an especially important advance for community oncologists across the country, given that more than half of patients with cutaneous melanoma will have tumors with activating mutations of the BRAF gene. When melanoma... »

If the current time in the field of medical oncology were to be labeled the era of targeted therapeutics, then we are about to leave it and enter the era of rational combinatorial therapy. The ongoing CLEOPATRA trial to evaluate the addition of pertuzumab to trastuzumab and docetaxel is illustrative of this new paradigm, which has been demonstrated in... »

Brentuximab vedotin was recently granted accelerated approval by the Food and Drug Administration for two indications: the treatment of patients with Hodgkin lymphoma after failure of autologous stem cell transplantation (ASCT) or after failure of at least two multiagent chemotherapy regimens in patients who are not candidates for ASCT; and for the... »

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently released its final rule implementing the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) and the Advanced Payment Model through which Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) would operate. The final rule contains many significant changes, made in response to the more than 1,300 comments the agency... »