If you read my blog post last week, hopefully you got a sense of the breadth of our coverage of the ASCO 2012 annual meeting, written in 500 words or less. However, just when you thought you had seen the last of our coverage of ASCO 2012, it’s back!
To keep us abreast of oncology developments, the good folks at ASCO continuously pushed out their own daily news coverage of the conference throughout, extending post-conference. Just as I started to feel that the ASCO annual conference had become a distant memory, I was excited by the appearance of the final issue of the “ASCO Daily News eDigest” in my email inbox today.
The headline of this email digest was an article about new clinical trial data that could spell hope for patients suffering from the frightening reality of cancer-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN). Data from this Phase 3 randomized trial demonstrated the effectiveness of the serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor duloxetine in reducing the physical pain of CIPN as well as its impact on the patient’s quality of life.
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In my opinion, the best feature of this final digest was the recap of the plenary sessions, which I was unable to cover extensively while attending the conference. The folks at ASCO boiled down their coverage of the plenary sessions to four major presentations. In one presentation, Dr. Maha Hussain discussed the results of an international collaborative Phase 3 clinical trial that demonstrated continuous androgen-deprivation (CAD), not intermittent androgen-deprivation therapy, as the standard of care in patients with hormone-sensitive metastatic prostate cancer. Following Hussain’s contribution to men’s health was another presentation designed to address an equivalent threat to women’s health: breast cancer. In her presentation of results from the EMILIA trial, Dr. Kimberly L. Blackwell demonstrated that trastuzumab emtansine has greater efficacy and safety compared to the combined therapy capecitabine plus lapatinib in treating women with advanced HER2-positive breast cancer.
Click here to read the full eDigest.
How will you use the information gathered from ASCO 2012 to improve clinical outcomes for your patients?
Readers: We’d love to hear from you in the comments section below! If you have a case study or a more extended response to this subject, click here to submit an item for us to publish.
