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 NCCN®, with support from the NCCN Foundation and the LIVESTRONG Foundation and through collaboration with Critical Mass: The Young Adult Cancer Alliance (Critical Mass), announces the availability of the NCCN Guidelines for Patients®: Caring for Adolescents and Young Adults (AYA). According to the LIVESTRONG Foundation, more than 70,000 young adults, ages 15 through 39, are diagnosed with cancer each year, and the survival rates for young adults have not increased since 1975, unlike the dramatic improvement seen in children and older adults. Patients within this age group, often falling between general demographics for pediatric and adult oncology, face a unique set of challenges, such as reentry into school or the workforce, insurance coverage issues, infertility resulting from treatment, neurocognitive effects, and secondary malignancies. |
NCCN.com Tip of the Month
The cancer journey can be a long, arduous one, and as a result, cancer survivors usually cannot just pick up their lives and resume where they left off before the cancer began. Often, there are physical, emotional, cognitive, relationship, and financial issues that will create what experts call, a “new normal,” and cancer patients will need to learn to adjust before they can get on with their lives. Click here for more information on dealing with the transition from patient to survivor.
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Member Institution Spotlight: Moffitt Cancer Center
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In the Cutaneous Clinic: Jeffrey Weber, MD, PhD, with Jennifer Diehl, RN |
Melanoma Research Exemplifies Personalized Medicine
Since the Moffitt Total Cancer Care protocol began banking patient-donated tumor tissues for genetic research, scientists at Moffitt Cancer Center have been searching for the right genetic information to predict who is at risk for which cancer. They have also been searching for the genetic keys that might unlock not only what kind of treatment an individual with a given kind of cancer should receive, but also if a patient runs the genetic risk of developing resistance to a certain treatment.
This kind of information is at the heart of what has come to be called “personalized medicine” — finding the right drug for the right patient at the right time.
Genetic profiling has been successful in identifying genes carrying a mutation that raises the risk for certain types of cancer. Recent success also has been realized for identifying the genetic changes that indicate the possibility of drug susceptibility or resistance. Melanoma is a good example.
“We have found that a large number of patients with melanoma who have the BRAF gene mutation develop resistance to BRAF inhibitors six months down the road,” explains Jeffrey Weber, MD, PhD, director of the Donald A. Adam Comprehensive Melanoma Research Center at Moffitt. “A recent approach is to find drugs that overcome resistance to agents that target mutated BRAF.”
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