Check out the iPad edition of this issue for video interviews from the ASCO Annual meeting. Download the Sept. 10 issue from the OT library of iPad issues and hear OT reporter Dan Keller talk to:
* Roy Herbst, MD, PhD, Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology and Chief of Medical Oncology at Yale Cancer Center, who discusses a promising new immunotherapeutic approach. Although immunotherapy for cancer overall has shown limited success over the years, a new technique overcomes the inability of T cells to attack the cancer and is showing good results in early trials in a variety of cancers. The research takes advantage of a cellular mechanism that allows many solid tumors to turn off T cells, and new agents aimed at this pathway may reinvigorate immunotherapy. Also key is that in this case, he explains, tumor antigens do not have to be identified and isolated, because T cells recognize whatever antigens the tumor cells present to them.
* Bruce Roth, MD, a specialist in genitourinary cancers, who is Professor of Medicine at Siteman Cancer Center and Chair of the ASCO Cancer Communications Committee, discusses a large Danish study by Mette Mortenson, MD, and colleagues reported at the meeting that showed that most patients treated for clinical stage I seminoma are cured with orchiectomy and can avoid follow-up adjuvant treatment. Regardless of the form of follow-up-radiotherapy, chemotherapy, or surveillance-the outcomes were excellent. Even among the almost 20 percent of patients with relapses, fewer than one percent died from testicular cancer or treatment-related causes. Roth talks about the implications of this particular study, as well as the need for more outcomes studies in general.
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