04 Jul
Speaker: Deborah Hurst, MD, Senior Director of Clinical Development, Chiron Corporation, Emeryville, California.
Low-dose interleukin-2 (IL-2) (Proleukin, Chiron), when administered in combination with rituximab (Rituxan, Genen-tech/IDEC) produces positive clinical responses in patients with advanced non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL), augmenting the antitumor activity of rituximab via expansion and activation of natural killer (NK) cells.
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03 Jul
Speaker: Brian I. Carr, MD, Professor of Medicine, Director of the Liver Tumor Service, and Head of the Starzl Transplant Institute, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Glass beads that release highly targeted p-rays from 90yttrium (Therasphere, MDS Nordion) represent an effective and relatively non-toxic treatment option for patients with unresectable and untransplantable advanced-stage hepatocel-lular carcinoma (HCC) and cirrhosis.
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02 Jul
Speaker: Ronald B. Natale, MD, Acting Medical Director, Cedars-Sinai Comprehensive Cancer Center, Beverly Hills, California.
Targeted therapy with the investigational oral epidermal growth factor (EGF) receptor inhibitor ZD1839 (Iressa, Astra Zeneca) was able to shrink tumors in some patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who were resistant to treatment with more than two prior chemothera-peutic regimens containing platinum and docetaxel. This therapeutic approach also resulted in a clinically significant response in disease-related symptoms and quality of life (QOL) in almost all patients with radiologic responses and over half of the patients with stable disease.
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01 Jul
Tamoxifen as Standard Adjuvant Hormonal Treatment
Speaker: Eric P. Winer, MD, Director of the Breast Oncology Center, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts.
Assessing the use of aromatase inhibitors as adjuvant therapy for women with hormone receptor positive (HR+) breast cancer, an American Society of Clinical Oncology panel stated that, based on data from the ongoing ATAC (Arimidex and Tamoxifen Alone or in Combination) trial, the panel considered the results of the trial and the extensive supporting data to be very promising, but insufficient to change the standard practice at this time. A five-year course of adjuvant tamoxifen remains the standard therapy for women with HR+ breast cancer.
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30 Jun
This simple recipe for opium tincture from the 19th century was considered quite an achievement in its time. Published by the United States Pharmacopeia (USP), early monographs like this one provided practitioners with the assurance that their patients were getting carefully prepared medicines and were using them correctly.
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29 Jun
We are unaccustomed to seeing the juxtaposition of the words that are in the title of this editorial. Indeed, I first heard this combination of words used in March 2002 at a special conference sponsored by our Office of Health Policy and Clinical Outcomes at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. The conference, entitled “Preparing Medical Directors for Decision Making in the Genomics Age,” featured faculty members from varying fields who were helping to prepare managed care medical directors for the challenges of managing in a world characterized by the possible creation of genetically based customized pharmaceutical agents.
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28 Jun
Speaker: Jo-Anne van Burik, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Micafungin (Fujisawa Healthcare, Inc.), a member of a new class of antifungal agents known as the echinocandins, has demonstrated a greater overall success rate than fluconazole (Generic Diflucon, Pfizer) as antifungal prophylactic therapy and has a more positive safety profile when administered to patients undergoing hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) during the neutropenic phase.
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