On Saturday, May 4, Philadelphians flooded the Benjamin Franklin Parkway for the Franklin Institute’s ninth annual Philadelphia Science Festival. For the fourth consecutive year, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) was a sponsor of the community event, giving eager kids and their families the opportunity to learn about science with hands-on experiments and activities.
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Since the 1990s, the cancer mortality rate in the U.S. has steadily declined. Yet liver cancer death rates in the U.S. have increased. Why?
Liver cancer is caused principally by the combination of a chronic hepatitis B virus infection and dietary exposure to aflatoxin B1, a contaminant that grows on corn and peanuts. Recent efforts to better control liver cancer globally include wide distribution of hepatitis B virus vaccines—more than a billion so far—and deployment of food safety tactics to prevent exposure to aflatoxin B1.
During late March and early April, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) made several decisions that have increased the number of treatment options for certain patients with bladder, lung, and kidney cancer. On March 18, 2019, the agency approved the immunotherapeutic atezolizumab (Tecentriq) for treating certain patients with small-cell lung cancer (SCLC). On April 12, 2019, it approved a new molecularly targeted therapeutic—erdafitinib (Balversa)—for treating certain patients with bladder cancer. Then, on April 19, 2019, it approved the immunotherapeutic pembrolizumab (Keytruda) for treating certain patients with kidney cancer.
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The Fifth AACR New Horizons in Cancer Research (NHiCR) international conference has concluded, and the more than 400 attendees are en route to their home countries, which included Australia, China, Colombia, Germany, Israel, Japan, Korea, Qatar, Singapore, Sweden, and the United States.
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Shenzhen is a remarkable place. It serves as a gateway to Hong Kong, and in its short 40-year history has grown to become China’s seventh largest city, with a population of 20 million and some of Mainland China’s tallest buildings. The Fifth AACR New Horizons in Cancer Research (NHiCR) International Conference sessions have attracted more than 350 basic, clinical, and translational researchers and practitioners from throughout China, the Asia-Pacific region, and worldwide.
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Greetings from Shenzhen, China, where the Fifth AACR New Horizons in Cancer Research (NHiCR) Conference is now underway. The event’s aim is to create and further a global forum for the communication and exchange of knowledge and latest findings in basic, translational, and clinical research and to foster cooperation and network development, leading to a decrease in global cancer incidence and mortality. The conference is co-organized through the collaborative efforts of AACR, Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School, The State Key Laboratory of Chemical Oncogenomics, and Shenzhen Bay Laboratory.
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As a regular feature on this blog, we spotlight 10 “must read” articles selected by our editors from each journal issue published by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). For the month of April, articles span from a preclinical study of a selective HER-2 inhibitor to a report on the prevalence of cancer risk factors and screening rates in the United States. As always, all articles summarized here are freely available for a limited time.
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The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2019 drew more than 21,000 attendees, providing a robust forum to present and discuss the latest breakthroughs in cutting-edge basic, translational, and clinical cancer research. As always, the meeting attracted some of the best minds in research and medicine, representing many facets of cancer care. Researchers, physician-scientists, policymakers, advocates, and industry representatives all played important roles in exchanging information over the course of a dynamic Annual Meeting program.
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Therapeutics that target two proteins called cyclin-dependent kinase 4 (CDK4) and CDK6 have revolutionized treatment for breast cancer, Richard S. Finn, MD, told attendees of the Making Science Count for Patients: CDK4/6 special session during the recent AACR Annual Meeting 2019. This session was designed to review the progress made with this class of anticancer therapeutics, starting from basic science through preclinical and clinical development, and to look to what we might expect from these agents in the future.
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One of the world’s largest cancer research conferences, the AACR Annual Meeting 2019, came to an end with a plenary session titled “AACR Annual Meeting 2019 Highlights: Vision for the Future.” Leaders of the AACR provided an overview of the stellar presentations from the meeting on the topics of prevention, early detection, interception, and the latest breakthroughs in cutting-edge basic, translational, and clinical research.
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Over the course of AACR Annual Meeting 2019, there were 213 presentations on incredibly exciting clinical trials. This is a record number of clinical trial presentations for an AACR Annual Meeting. The trials presented covered the continuum of cancer treatment, from surgery, to radiotherapy and chemotherapy, to the two newest pillars of cancer care—molecularly targeted therapy and immunotherapy. The final clinical trials plenary session of the Annual Meeting epitomized this diversity by showcasing clinical trials reporting new ways to combine radiotherapy with other types of treatment, and new advances in immunotherapy and molecularly targeted therapy.
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