TOP - April 2010 Vol 3, No 2

Opened in 1989, the Comprehensive Cancer Center (CCC) at Desert Regional Medical Center was the first multidisciplinary outpatient cancer program in the Palm Springs, California, area. The CCC represents the collaboration of the multispecialty regional medical center with Aptium Oncology, a national provider of oncology management and consulting services. The CCC now employs 120 healthcare professionals and provides a full range of services, including screening, diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up care under one roof.

Investigators are reporting favorable results with a program that allows a hospital pharmacy to employ pharmacists who are not able to work onsite in the hospital.

Pharmacists can make a significant contribution to an overseas medical mission. In fact, the participation of a pharmacist on a recent mission to rural Kenya led by a California-based hospital proved to be so invaluable that all future missions to that region plan to have a pharmacist onboard.

Researchers are calling for increased awareness of the potential for chemotherapy-induced visual disturbances.

Chemotherapy appears to be associated with a statistically significant decrease in the relative risk of prostate cancer-specific mortality among older men with stage IV prostate cancer who are receiving androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT), according to a new study.

Most cases of severe treatment-related adverse reactions to the targeted therapies for kidney cancer appear to be reversible and resolve after dose reduction or treatment in terruption, according to Thomas Hutson, DO, PharmD, director of genitourinary oncology at Baylor Sammons Cancer Center, Dallas, Texas.

A new interventional radiology treatment that utilizes intra-arterial yttrium-90 (Y-90) microspheres may prolong the lives of many patients with hepatocellular carcinoma. New data presented at the Society of Interventional Radiology's 35th annual scientific meeting showed this approach may extend life for the more than three fourths of hepatocellular carcinoma patients who are not eligible for surgery.

For women with human epidermal growth factor receptor type 2 (HER2)-positive early breast cancer, delaying trastuzumab until chemotherapy is completed may impair outcomes, according to findings from the landmark N9831 trial. The findings were presented by Edith Perez, MD, director of the Breast Cancer Program at the Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, Florida.

For the prevention of skeletal-related events (SREs) in breast cancer patients with bone metastasis, denosumab proved superior to zoledronic acid (ZA) in a head-to-head randomized comparison conducted in 2048 women.

For patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma (MM), bortezomib-based therapy is effective after lenalidomide plus dexamethasone (LD), according to a Canadian study that evaluated sequencing of novel agents presented at the 51st Annual Meeting and Exposition of the American Society of Hematology.