Vol. 20/No. 2

Patients with blood cancers face greater treatment costs than those with solid tumors. Furthermore, healthcare spending for these patients is already higher than average before diagnosis and does not return to prediagnosis levels even after successful treatment.

Since the Warburg effect has been observed in the majority of cancer types, many studies have focused on developing therapies that target metabolic pathways.

Clinical trial evidence is building for moving checkpoint blockade immunotherapy forward in the treatment timeline for non–small cell lung cancer, but improving patient selection for these therapies remains a key challenge.

Open access to unbiased data repositories of molecular and clinical data will be essential to accelerating future discoveries in precision medicine.

Despite changes affecting how oncologists prescribe and manage opioid use among their patients, there are few data analyzing the frequency and extent to which patients with cancer die of opioid overdoses.

In en effort to ensure that study participants are more reflective of real-world populations, the National Cancer Institute has revised its clinical trial protocols to expand access for previously excluded patients.

Much needs to be done to improve interoperability of medical data systems. However, standards and new systems are developing at a rapid pace, affording advantages and efficiencies where, previously, enormous impediments stood in the way.

Major cancer centers are examining their current protocols to develop new ways to manage pain with shorter courses of opioids—or, if appropriate, with nonopioid approaches.

The development of cancer treatments and diagnostic tools using CRISPR/Cas9 and other gene-editing technology is a promising area of research in the United States, although the field is moving into human studies at a relatively slow pace.

Investigators are taking a personalized approach to treating patients with multiple myeloma by introducing novel agents in combination with backbone chemotherapies, based on patients’ individual genetic profiles.

The concept of chronic disease management in cancer has been and continues to be inadequately considered.