Interviews

Ghassan K. Abou-Alfa, MD, medical oncologist, Memorial Sloan Kettering, discusses what is on the horizon for the use of PD-L1 agents in liver cancer.

​Louis B. Harrison, discusses the recent opportunities to combine radiation therapy and immunotherapy.

Mahmoud Al-Hawary, MD, discusses the current NCCN guidelines for imaging and how they play a role in patients with pancreatic cancer.

Tuya Pal, MD, discusses the importance of genetic risk assessment shaping management guidelines in ovarian cancer.

Jeffrey Jones, MD, discusses treatment options for patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) who progress on, or become intolerant of, idelalisib or ibrutinib during their treatment.

Eytan Stein, MD, discusses targeting multiple mutations in patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML).

John Leonard, MD, discusses the number of options doctors have to choose from when treating follicular lymphomas.

Sagar Lonial, MD, discusses an ongoing phase III trial investigating if any interventions would change the natural history of smoldering myeloma.

Christina Baik, MD, MPH, discusses alectinib compared to crizotinib in the first-line setting for patients with ALK-positive lung cancer.

The studies examined ruxolitinib compared to placebo in the United States (COMFORT-I) and best available therapy in Europe (COMFORT-II) for patients with myelofibrosis.

Eytan Stein, MD, discusses the benefits of being able to identify drivers in acute myeloid leukemia and having drugs coming into the clinics to target those biological mutations.

Thomas Stinchcombe, MD, discusses the complicated nature of squamous cell lung cancer. Stinchcombe says that there has been a recent boom in targeted therapies for non-squamous cell lung cancer, though not as much research in squamous cell lung cancer due to its multitude of mutations.

John Leonard, MD, discusses the inefficacy of early treatment and treatment options for patients with follicular lymphoma. Leonard says the relapse rate for patients with follicular lymphoma is around 80%.

Christina Baik, MD, MPH, assistant professor, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, Thoracic/Head and Neck, Department of Medicine, Division of Medical Oncology, University of Washington, discusses the efficacy of alectinib after first-line crizotinib in patients with ALK-positive lung cancer. Baik says alectinib generally works for about 8 months and is easy to take for patients.

Sagar Lonial, MD, professor, School of Medicine, executive vice chair, Department of Hematology & Medical Oncology, chief medical officer, Winship Cancer Institute, Emory University, discusses whether or not to treat patients with smoldering multiple myeloma (SMM), or asymptomatic myeloma.

Sunil Verma, MD, Medical Director, Tom Baker Cancer Centre, Professor and Department Head, Oncology, Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary, discusses the future of immunotherapies and anti-HER2 drugs in the treatment paradigm for HER2-positive breast cancer.

Elizabeth Mittendorf, MD, PhD, associate professor, Department of Surgical Oncology, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, discusses discovering a predictive biomarker response in vaccine therapy for patients with breast cancer.

Edward Kim, MD, chair of the department of Solid Tumor Oncology, Levine Cancer Institute, discusses the further work that needs to be done when indicating patient populations with certain biomarkers in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Sarah Goldberg, MD, MPH, assistant professor of Medicine and Medical Oncology, Yale Cancer Center, discusses coming trials looking at immunotherapy beyond the second-line setting in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Julia White, MD, professor of Radiation Oncology, Ohio State University, discusses the pros and cons of multi-gene assays when trying to determine the risk of local recurrence in patients with breast cancer.

Verma says one of the major new understandings of the disease is that the HER2 receptor needs to be suppressed at all times within the treatment paradigm of the malignancy.

Ursula Matulonis, MD, medical director of Gynecologic Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, discusses two upcoming trials for both platinum-resistant and platinum-sensitive recurrent ovarian cancer.

​Elizabeth Mittendorf, MD, PhD, associate professor, Department of Surgical Oncology, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, discusses an upcoming peptide vaccine to prevent recurrence in patients with breast cancer.

Hays says current genetic testing gives oncologists a wide variety of information that may make choosing the correct treatment "a little more difficult." Hays adds that within the current treatment paradigm of gynecologic cancer, oncologists are mainly focusing on BRCA mutations.

Partridge says that the current school of thought is younger women should be treated the same as older women with breast cancer, though younger women tend to develop more aggressive breast cancer with more nodal involvement.

Perou says this research also found three expression subtypes within lobular breast cancer, one of which showed a proliferative phenotype and portended a slightly worse prognosis.

Cooperberg says a growing body of evidence dictates that surgery in prostate cancer may be a more effective local therapy than radiation alone.

Boughey says an ongoing national clinical trial is looking at patients with ER+ breast cancer and treating them with neoadjuvant endocrine therapy.

Partridge says there continues to be a growing epidemic of women getting a bilateral mastectomy for unilateral breast cancer. These surgeries include women who are not at high-risk.

Postow cites the combination of vemurafenib and ipilimumab as one that produced a high rate of liver inflammation and skin rash in patients, which was then deemed not to be given to patients outside of clinical trials.