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A retrospective study of Medicare patients over 65 years of age with stage II colon cancer, showed that adjuvant chemotherapy did not improve overall survival, even in patients with poor prognostic factors. But, does this mean that these patients should not be offered this treatment option?boxed-text
In a recent randomized trial, electromotive intravesical administration of mitomycin before transurethral resection was shown to be effective in the prevention of bladder cancer recurrence. Although this treatment seems to be promising, one question remains: can these results be reproduced by other research groups? If this is the case, it could become a new standard.
Cancer medicine frequently balances probability of cure against morbidity of treatment. A recent trial in patients with Hodgkin lymphoma compared two regimens of different intensity and toxicity and examined not only the immediate results, but also the broader algorithm of care, factoring in the effects of salvage treatment and high-dose therapy.
Large randomized phase III trials conducted in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) harboring activating mutations in EGFR have demonstrated that erlotinib or gefitinib are superior to platinum-based chemotherapy. Zhou et al. have now confirmed that these agents represent the best treatment we can offer today as front-line therapy for EGFR-mutant NSCLC.boxed-text
Microarray-based gene-expression profiling has advanced the breast cancer field. However, definitive answers to many of the questions for the successful implementation of personalized medicine remain elusive. The authors discuss the hurdles in the development and validation of molecular classification systems, and the challenges ahead for development of the next generation of molecular predictors.
Personalized medicine in lung cancer has seen great advances in the past decade. In this Review, Tony Mok examines the development of drugs that target mutations inEGFR and the oncogenic fusion gene EML4–ALKas examples of this progress and discusses the necessary tools to improve the chance of future successes.
Personalized cancer medicine—where treatments are selected and tailored for individual patients—is now a reality, although improvements are needed to identify predictive biomarkers for stratifying and subgrouping patients. A critical appraisal of biomarkers in clinical use for a range of cancers is presented, and the unique and unprecedented opportunity to deliver personalized cancer therapy on an ongoing and rational basis is highlighted.
A recent trial randomly allocated 1,979 men with localized prostate cancer to radiation therapy with or without neoadjuvant androgen deprivation. Despite the combination reducing prostate cancer-specific mortality by approximately 60% and producing a modest overall survival benefit in men with intermediate-risk cancers, the authors did not recommend changing the standard of care—why?