Forty years later

Article

For the opening day of the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and to mark the 40th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. National Cancer Act, a new website developed by the organization highlights how far we've come in preventing, screening and treating cancer. George Sledge, ASCO president, says it shows the return on the nation's investment in cancer research.To mark 40 years, ASCO has created the site CancerProgress.Net to highlight the history of cancer research over time and some of the milestones we've reached, including approval of the first targeted therapy cancer drug and the finding that second-hand smoke is carcinogenic. Videos, downloads and other interactive features help make the site educational and informative. The timeline also can be filtered to advancements according to tumor type and various fields, such as prevention, screening, type of therapy and quality of life. And as we make further progress in cancer research, new milestones will be added to the website."Curing cancer isn't as easy as landing on the moon," Sledge said at a press briefing on Friday, but instead progresses with steady, incremental steps and occasional leaps forward.

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For patients with cancer, the ongoing chemotherapy shortage may cause some anxiety as they wonder how they will receive their drugs. However, measuring drugs “down to the minutiae of the milligrams” helped patients receive the drugs they needed, said Alison Tray. Tray is an advanced oncology certified nurse practitioner and current vice president of ambulatory operations at Rutgers Cancer Institute in New Jersey. If patients are concerned about getting their cancer drugs, Tray noted that having “an open conversation” between patients and providers is key. “As a provider and a nurse myself, having that conversation, that reassurance and sharing the information is a two-way conversation,” she said. “So just knowing that we're taking care of you, we're going to make sure that you receive the care that you need is the key takeaway.” In June 2023, many patients were unable to receive certain chemotherapy drugs, such as carboplatin and cisplatin because of an ongoing shortage. By October 2023, experts saw an improvement, although the “ongoing crisis” remained. READ MORE: Patients With Lung Cancer Face Unmet Needs During Drug Shortages “We’re really proud of the work that we could do and achieve that through a critical drug shortage,” Tray said. “None of our patients missed a dose of chemotherapy and we were able to provide that for them.” Tray sat down with CURE® during the 49th Annual Oncology Nursing Society Annual Congress to discuss the ongoing chemo shortage and how patients and care teams approached these challenges. Transcript: Particularly at Hartford HealthCare, when we established this infrastructure, our goal was to make sure that every patient would get the treatment that they need and require, utilizing the data that we have from ASCO guidelines to ensure that we're getting the optimal high-quality standard of care in a timely fashion that we didn't have to delay therapies. So, we were able to do that by going down to the minutiae of the milligrams on hand, particularly when we had a lot of critical drug shortages. So it was really creating that process to really ensure that every patient would get the treatment that they needed. For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don’t forget to subscribe to CURE®’s newsletters here.
Yuliya P.L Linhares, MD, an expert on CLL
Yuliya P.L Linhares, MD, and Josie Montegaard, MSN, AGPCNP-BC, experts on CLL
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