Oncology

LONDON—New and comprehensive data showing that millions of cases of breast cancer could be avoided by treating women at high risk of the disease — but who are not yet ill — with the class of drugs known as selective …

WASHINGTON DC—Doctors taking the unusual step of combining two experimental drugs to treat cancers in patients who have mutated BRCA — the gene conferring susceptibility to breast, ovarian and some other solid tumours — found that patients responded through what …

WASHINGTON DC—Laboratory evidence that giving patients intermittent rather than continuous treatment with cancer drugs could help them overcome drug resistance in cancers such as melanoma was presented at the American Association for Cancer Research 2013 meeting. Dr Darrin Stuart from …

WASHINGTON DC—A new blood test has detected drug-resistant mutations reliably in patients with gastrointestinal stromal tumour (GIST) helping to guide therapy when first-line drugs had failed. This was in a study using the recently approved agent regorafenib…

WASHINGTON DC—Gene expression and molecular pathways in head and neck cancer have been identified with reference to The Cancer Genome Atlas in research presented at the American Association for Cancer Research annual conference. The PIK-3CA pathway and P 53 gene …

WASHINGTON DC—A new type of immunotherapy has brought responses in children with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in relapse who had no other options to prevent the progress of this fatal phase of the disease. At the American Association…

WASHINGTON DC—Patients with metastatic breast cancer who are HER-2 positive could potentially be treated with the anti-HER-2 conjugated drug, trastuzumab-emtansine (T-DM1), alone — without needing to add chemotherapy. This prediction was made at the American…

WASHINGTON DC—A new type of immunotherapy has helped patients with advanced ovarian cancer who had no other therapeutic options. In a study reported to the 2013 conference of the American Association for Cancer Research Dr Lana Kandalaft from…

CAMBRIDGE, UK—A new blood test promises quicker assessment of treatment efficacy in patients with metastatic breast cancer. Dr Dana Tsui and colleagues from the Cancer Research UK Institute at Cambridge University report in the New England Journal of Medicine that …

Walking a dog most days could cut down your risk of having a recurrence of breast cancer, according to research presented at the St Gallen conference on Primary Therapy of Early Breast Cancer in Switzerland — where delegates also heard …

ST GALLEN, SWITZERLAND—Bisphosphonates have an important part to play in managing breast cancer according to research reported at the 2013 St Gallen conference on “Primary Therapy of Early Breast Cancer”. Professor Robert Coleman…