Audio Journal of Oncology Podcast

Interviews:

Ravindra Uppaluri, MD PhD, Director of Head and Neck Surgical Oncology, Dana Farber Brigham Cancer Center, Boston MA

Ryan B Corcoran MD PhD, Director of the gastrointestinal cancer program, Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, Associate Professor of Medicine Harvard Medical School and Co-Chair of the American Association for Cancer Research Clinical Trials Committee.

CHICAGO, USA—Perioperative immunotherapy, using the PD-1 blocker pembrolizumab both before and after surgery, has been investigated in patients with newly diagnosed head and neck cancers in the phase three KEYNOTE-689 study. Findings were reported at the 2025 Annual Meeting of...

An interview with: Kathryn C Arbour MD, Thoracic Medical Oncologist, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York USA

And: Ryan B Corcoran MD PhD, Massachusetts General Cancer Center, Associate Professor of Medicine Harvard Medical School, Co-Chair, American Association for Cancer Research Clinical Trials Committee

CHICAGO, USA— The four per cent of patients with previously treated non-small cell lung cancer whose tumors harbor a KRAS G12D mutation (found in about four per cent of patients) may soon have an effective targeted treatment: currently an unmet need. Clinical benefit from the oral KRAS G12D inhibitor zoldonrasib is...

An interview with:

Ajay Goel PhD, Chair of the Molecular Diagnostics and Experimental Therapeutics Department, Beckman Research Institute, City of Hope, Los Angeles California.

 SAN DIEGO—The prospect of detecting pancreatic cancer at very early stages, when cure may be possible, is now being held out by research showing that the sub-cellular molecules called “exosomes” (shed into the bloodstream by cancer cells) can be analyzed to get very early diagnosis of the disease.

Study results using liquid biopsy to test for exosomes were reported at the 2024 American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting in San...

An interview with: Sundar Jagannath MBBS, Professor of Medicine, Hematology and Medical Oncology, Director of the Center of Excellence for Multiple Myeloma, Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai, New York.

Sarah Maxwell, Audio Journal of Oncology:

“An exciting, new immunotherapy treatment for multiple myeloma, was under discussion at the 2024 American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting, held in San Diego.  It was with a drug that targets not one but two cells to fight the disease.

The agent, linvoseltamab, is a B-cell maturation antigen-targeted, T-cell-engaging, bispecific antibody. A multi-center international study, reported at the...

An interview with:

Olivier Lantz MD PhD, Head of the Clinical Immunology Laboratory, Institut Curie, Paris, France

PARIS, France—A clinical trial using a personalized therapeutic vaccine, that recognizes multiple genetic features of each patient’s tumor, brought durable tumor-specific immune responses in patients with surgically resected HPV-negative head and neck squamous cell cancers, and also prevented relapse in some patients.

At the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, held in San Diego, California, Olivier Lantz MD PhD, Head of the Clinical Immunology Laboratory at the Institut Curie in Pa...

SAN ANTONIO, USA—Women with hormone receptor positive HER-2 negative breast cancer and Oncotype DX recurrence scores above 31 could benefit from having anthracycline therapy added to their taxane-based chemotherapy, according to breast medical oncologist and assistant professor of internal medicine, Nan Chen MD, from the University of Chicago.

She reported her group’s latest analysis of records from 2,528 patients in the TAILORx trial at the 2024 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium comparing patients being treated after surgery with taxane/cyclophosphamide chemotherapy with or without additional anthracycline. After her talk she discussed the findings with Peter Goodwin:

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Adding the poly ADP ribose polymerase (PARP) inhibitor drug talazoparib to standard anti-androgen therapy with enzalutamide statistically significantly extended overall survival among patients whose metastatic castration resistant prostate cancers had specific molecular markers.

This finding was reported at the 2025 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Genitourinary Cancers Symposium held in San Francisco from the TALAPRO-2 phase three clinical trial investigating patients with or without homologous recombination repair (HRR) gene alterations.

The co-lead author of the study, Karim Fizazi MD PhD, Head of the Genitourinary Oncology Group at the Gustave Roussy Institute in Pa...

Audio Journal of Oncology

Patients with Desmoplastic Melanoma Were Exceptional Responders to Single Agent Pembrolizumab

LOS ANGELES, CA—Single agent immunotherapy with the anti-programmed death-1 (PD-1) agent pembrolizumab resulted in markedly high melanoma-specific survival rates among patients with either resectable or metastatic desmoplastic melanoma in a study reported to the American Association for Cancer Research 2025 Immno Oncology conference.

Lead researcher Kari L Kendra MD PhD, Director of the Cutaneous Oncology Program and Chair of the Melanoma Disease Specific Committee at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center in Columbus, OH gave the Audio Jour...

Bilateral Mastectomy and Salpingo-Oophorectomy Significantly Extend Survival In BRCA-mutation Carriers Who Already Have Breast Cancer

The important question of whether to recommend risk-reducing surgery to patients who are carriers of pathogenic mutations in either BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes (or both), and have already developed breast cancer, has been investigated in a study from Italy reported at the 2025 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Researcher Matteo Lambertini MD PhD, from the University of Genoa, Assistant Professor and Consultant in Medical Oncology at the San Martino IST Hospital in Genoa, Italy, gave the details to Audio Journal of...

SAN ANTONIO, USA—In patients with hormone receptor-positive, HER2-negative, low-risk ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) active monitoring, compared with surgery, resulted in no difference in terms of cancer outcomes in the multicenter, randomized COMET study that compared oncologic outcomes of patients randomized to guideline-concordant care (with surgery alone or with radiation therapy) or active monitoring. COMET investigated 995 patients with grade one or two DCIS with no evidence of invasive cancer.

After reporting the findings at the 2024 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, study author E. Shelley Hwang MD MPH, Breast Surgeon and Director of the Breast Oncology Pr...