Volume 14 Issue 10, October 2017

Patients with metastatic soft-tissue sarcoma can benefit from systemic therapy, but the best drug combinations for the different disease subtypes remain to be established. Recently, great emphasis has been placed on histology-based chemotherapy regimens. Herein, we discuss the results of a recently published study demonstrating that some of these regimens are not superior to standard-of-care chemotherapy in the neoadjuvant setting.

Important biological questions can be addressed by interrogating the transcriptomes of cancer cells. In a recently published landmark study, Giustacchini and collaborators used a single-cell approach to analyse mRNA of cancer cells derived from patients with chronic myeloid leukaemia. Herein, we discuss how this approach could be used to address relevant clinical questions.

First-line, potent androgen blockade for patients with newly diagnosed, advanced-stage, castration-sensitive prostate cancer is confirmed as an effective strategy by data from the STAMPEDE and LATITUDE trials. Herein, we highlight the benefits, discuss caveats and consider the clinical care implications of these findings.

Patients with early stage breast cancer have traditionally been assigned adjuvant systemic therapies on the basis of the clinical and histological characteristics of their disease. However, this approach often leads to overtreatment. In this Review, the authors describe the use of gene-expression signatures, some of which are already in clinical use, for determining the risks of recurrence and progression, and the most appropriate form of adjuvant therapy.

According to the cancer stem cell (CSC) paradigm, a minor subpopulation of cancer cells with stem-cell properties predominantly underlies tumour progression, therapy resistance, and disease recurrence. Notably, epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) is implicated in these processes, and CSCs typically show markers of EMT-programme activation. Herein, the authors outline our current understanding of the links between the EMT programme, the CSC phenotype, metastasis, and drug resistance, and discuss the potential for therapeutic targeting of these facets of tumour biology.

Accurate detection and monitoring of treatment responses is an essential element of the management of patients with lymphoma. In this Perspectives, the authors describe the evolution of lymphoma staging criteria and highlight unaddressed questions, which, if answered, will substantially improve the management of patients with lymphoma.