There's a new home for news and congress coverage! Catch up on all the top stories and latest evidence in oncology research with our ESMO congress hub page.  Learn more »

. © 2018 Springer Healthcare part of the Springer Nature group See also: Steady decline in serious comorbidities among pediatric cancer survivors Regional hyperthermia justified in localized high-risk soft tissue sarcoma

ASCO 2018: Adding nelarabine plus escalating methotrexate boosts pediatric, young adult T-ALL outcomes

Research presented at the 2017 annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology shows childhood cancer survivors diagnosed in more recent years can expect to experience fewer serious chronic conditions than those diagnosed in earlier decades.

TRK fusions are detected in 0.5–1.0% of common cancers and are found almost universally in some rare tumor types, he said, explaining that the current estimated rate of 1500–5000 affected US adult and pediatric patients per year may be low because of a lack of screening.

They analyzed data from 23,603 participants of the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study, which comprises US and Canadian pediatric cancer patients who survive for at least 5 years beyond diagnosis.

David Hong, from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, USA, and team collated data from three clinical trials of adult, adolescent, and pediatric patients undergoing treatment for a broad range of tumors including soft tissue sarcoma, and cancers of the thyroid, salivary gland, lung, colon, and breast.

medwireNews : Larotrectinib has been recommended for approval by the EMA and is indicated for adult and pediatric patients with solid tumors harboring an NTRK gene fusion.

Early findings point to the antitumor efficacy of the next-generation TRK inhibitor LOXO-195 in patients with NTRK fusion-positive cancers and NTRK resistance mutations acquired during treatment with first-generation agents.

medwireNews spoke to Miranda Fidler, from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and Simon Davies, from Teen Cancer America, about the ACCELERATE working group's proposal to improve adolescent patients’ access to new cancer drugs. Click for the accompanying news story

. © 2019 Springer Healthcare part of the Springer Nature group See also: Atezolizumab-platinum-based chemotherapy NSCLC regimens advance to phase III trials Atezolizumab receives NICE recommendation for NSCLC Larotrectinib ‘potential standard of care’ for adult, pediatric, TRK fusion tumors Pembrolizumab receives agnostic approval for MSI-H/dMMR tumours

Mel Greaves (Institute of Cancer Research, London, UK) discusses his proposed theory for the etiology of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia, in which early microbial exposure plays a key role (10:21).

Levofloxacin prophylaxis significantly reduces the risk for bacteremia among children receiving intensive chemotherapy for acute leukemia, but not among those undergoing hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, study data show.

This month we round-up four hematologic cancer trials, two looking at treatment options for older and younger patients with Hodgkin lymphoma, and two evaluating treatments for smoldering and relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma. Read on to find out more.

The toxicity profile of the CAR T-cell therapy was similar to that in the pediatric and young adult study, with the cytokine release syndrome occurring in 85% of study participants (grade ≥3 in 26%) and neurotoxicity seen in 44% (grade ≥3 in 42%).

A North American survey finds that around a quarter of long-term survivors of childhood cancers are likely to remain in the same job in order to maintain work-related health insurance.

Tumor-specific DNA can be retrieved from the aqueous humor of patients with retinoblastoma, say US researchers, allowing genetic analysis in patients who do not have a biopsy sample available.

Continuing to discuss the challenges, Fern pointed out that “screening young people for cancers is really difficult.”