radiation
Optimizing Radio-Immunotherapy for Cancer
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Zachary Morris
Credit: Alan Leon
Zachary Morris has certainly done some memorable things. As a Rhodes Scholar, he once attended an evening reception at Buckingham Palace, played a game of pick-up football with former President Bill Clinton, and traveled to South Africa to take a Robben Island Prison tour, led by the late Nelson Mandela. But something the young radiation oncologist did during his medical residency could prove even more momentous. He received a special opportunity from the American Board of Radiology to join others in studying how to pair radiation therapy with the emerging cancer treatment strategy of immunotherapy.
Morris’s studies in animals showed that the two treatments have a unique synergy, generating a sustained tumor-specific immune response that’s more potent than either therapy alone. But getting this combination therapy just right to optimize its cancer-fighting abilities remains complicated. Morris, now a researcher and clinician at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Madison, has received a 2017 NIH Director’s Early Independence Award to look deeper into this promising approach. He and his collaborators will use what they learn to better inform their future early stage clinical trials of radio-immunotherapy starting with melanoma, head and neck cancers, and neuroblastoma.
Weighing Surgical Options for Breast Cancer
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
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An increasing number of women with cancer in one breast are choosing to have both breasts surgically removed in hopes of reducing the chance of developing cancer in the unaffected breast. But does this approach—called bilateral, or double, mastectomy—really improve the odds of survival? A new NIH-funded study indicates that, for the vast majority of women, it does not [1].
A research team led by Allison Kurian, an oncologist at Stanford University School of Medicine, and Scarlett Gomez, an epidemiologist at the Cancer Prevention Institute of California in Fremont, used the California Cancer Registry to study the 10-year survival outcomes of patients diagnosed with early-stage cancer (stages 0–III) in one breast, between 1998 and 2011.
