A Palliative Care Intervention for Patients on Phase 1 Studies.

Phase 1 clinical trials remain vital for oncology care. Patients on these trials require supportive care for quality-of-life (QOL) concerns. To test a Palliative Care Intervention (PCI) for patients with solid tumors enrolled in Phase I therapeutic trials with a priori hypothesis that psychological distress, QOL, satisfaction, symptoms, and resource utilization would be improved in the PCI group.

Precision Cancer Trials With Immunomodulatory Agents: Personalizing Histology Agnostic Approaches.

Advances in high-throughput technologies have yielded impressive insights into the molecular biology behind cancers, resulting in a powerful ally for the development of biomarkers-selected clinical trials, which are critical for translating our genomic knowledge into clinically meaningful outcomes. "Basket studies" or histology-agnostic clinical trials in biomarker-defined populations represent an important research strategy to continue making progress in this field. The recent accelerated US Food and Drug Administration approvals of anti-programmed death 1 pembrolizumab and nivolumab for mismatch repair-deficient cancers, as well as larotrectinib for cancers carrying TRK fusions, support the fundamental premise that some cancers may be best classified based on molecular phenotype and not site of origin.

The role of epigenetic therapies in colorectal cancer.

Although developments in the diagnosis and therapy of colorectal cancer (CRC) have been made in the last decade, much work remains to be done as it remains the second leading cause of cancer death. It is now well established that epigenetic events, together with genetic alterations, are key events in initiation and progression of CRC. Epigenetics refers to heritable alterations in gene expression that do not involve changes in the DNA sequence.