March 2012, Vol 3, No 2

Findings from 2 separate studies have shown that adding the vascular endothelial growth factor inhibitor bevacizumab to adjuvant chemotherapy regimens improves response rates in patients with early-stage breast cancer (Bear HD, et al. N Engl J Med. 2012;366:310-320; von Minckwitz G, et al. N Engl J Med. 2012;366:299-309).

Professor Jonathan Waxman, of Imperial College London, an expert in prostate cancer who founded the Prostate Cancer Charity in England and helped garner support for cancer treatment, has denounced the refusal of the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) to approve the 2 new and expensive prostate cancer drugs approved last year in the United States, saying that NICE "has overregulated and proscribed drugs that offer real advances to people with cancer.

The Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF) is expanding its efforts to encourage innovation in prostate cancer research.

An online tool launched by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will help patients, providers, and researchers navigate the rapidly growing landscape of genetic testing, many of them associated with cancer therapy.

Results of a new survey of primary care physicians (PCPs) show that 1 in 3 PCPs believe that ovarian cancer screening is safe and effective, contrary to current evidence. The survey was published in the February 7, 2012, issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.

Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, FL, has announced it is launching its Personalized Medicine Institute to advance the fight against cancer, and implementing the promise of personalized cancer care medicine by focusing on innovative biotechnology with its biotechnology subsidiary M2Gen.

Researchers at Espicom Business Intelligence, a medical and pharmaceutical market analysis company, predict that the development of novel biologic approaches to drug therapy will bring "a sea change" to the approach to cancer therapy, by focusing on controlling solid tumors and the introduction of new drugs that target new pathways.

San Francisco, CA—A personalized form of immunotherapy added to sunitinib (Sutent) treatment prolonged survival to beyond 30 months in almost half of patients with newly diagnosed, unfavorable-risk metastatic renal-cell carcinoma (mRCC), according to the results of an open-label phase 2 study presented at the 2012 Genitourinary Cancer Symposium.

San Francisco, CA—The dosage of axitinib, the standard second-line treatment for metastatic renal-cell carcinoma (mRCC), should be uptitrated in those patients who fail to achieve therapeutic blood levels on the standard 5-mg daily dosage, according to a new analysis of an international randomized trial presented at the 2012 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium.

San Francisco, CA—More than 1 in 10 patients with metastatic prostate cancer never receive anticancer treatment for their disease, according to an examination of the National Cancer Database.