Mike Hennessy

Diagnosing and treating a patient with a less common cancer can be challenging for practitioners, yet with greater awareness and better diagnostics more of these rare cancers are likely to show up in the clinic.

The FDA has been very busy lately granting approvals for a host of new anticancer agents, drug combinations, and indications.

What a year it has been for FDA approvals in oncology! With the holidays upon us, there is much to be thankful for in the world of cancer research, where advances in understanding tumor biomarkers have ushered in a host of new personalized therapies for many patients.

More and more Americans are embracing complementary medicine to help manage their illnesses alongside conventional therapies, and in oncology, nurses know well how important these interventions can be to improving patient and survivor quality of life.

We continue to marvel at the tremendous strides made in cancer care, a record of progress that means millions of people are now surviving cancer, and many for a very long time.

When some 30,000 oncology practitioners, researchers, and patient advocates gather each year for the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), we've come to count on some pretty important research updates emerging from that gathering. This year's meeting-ASCO's 51st-proved no exception.

It's really no surprise that the buzz at the major oncology meetings these days centers on how immunotherapy is being deployed in the treatment of many hard-to-treat cancers-moving far beyond the melanoma setting where the approach has already proven so successful.