Volume 13 Issue 10, October 2016

In three practice guidelines from ASCO, experts provide evidence-based recommendations that address overarching clinical questions for the management of patients with pancreatic cancer. These guidelines offer improved strategies for interdisciplinary patient management and highlight the need for further research in several areas.

The use of programmed cell-death protein 1 (PD-1) inhibitors has become the standard-of-care approach for patients with advanced-stage, previously treated non-small-cell lung cancer. The inevitable adoption of these agents in the first-line setting is rapidly approaching, but the optimal strategy remains unclear. Two published clinical trial reports, examining different approaches, help to frame this question.

The advent of next-generation sequencing technologies has substantially improved our understanding of prostate cancer genetics; however, this knowledge is currently not fully reflected in the form of targeted treatment strategies. In this Review, the authors summarize our current understanding of the genetic landscape of prostate cancer and the challenges to treatment posed by the presence of considerable intratumour and intertumour heterogeneity.

Local and systemic treatments for advanced or metastatic cancer are rarely curative. Innate and/or acquired resistance can reduce therapy responsiveness, with studies highlighting the contribution of therapy-induced physiological changes in host tissues and cells that reduce the antitumour effects of therapy. These unwanted host effects can promote tumour-cell repopulation and malignant aggressiveness. In this Review, the author discusses ways to suppress these host-response effects as a possible new approach to improving local and systemic cancer therapies.

The National Cancer Research Institute Clinical and Translational Radiotherapy Research Working Group (CTRad) includes academia, industry, patient groups and regulatory bodies representatives. In this Consensus Statement, recommendations are provided with the aim of increasing the number of novel drugs being successfully registered in combination with radiotherapy in clinical trials for patients with cancer.

Comparisons of patients' and clinicians' reports of adverse effects during clinical trials frequently reveal underreporting by clinicians and a discord between the severities of the adverse effects experienced by patients and estimates from clinicians. Despite this situation, few trials include patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs). In this Perspectives, the authors compare and discuss the use of such measures in clinical trials in men with prostate cancer over the past 5 years, highlighting a need for greater use of PROMs.