cancer

A young cancer doctor uses social media to skewer what he sees as overblown claims for "precision medicine." That doesn't make him hugely popular at cancer research meetings.

Krauthammer is a columnist for The Washington Post, and commentator on Fox News. He has been fighting an aggressive form of cancer, and says his long fight against the disease "is over."

Are some people getting too much treatment for their cancers? The answer, from the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago, is an emphatic yes.

An aggressive type of breast cancer — a HER2-positive tumor — often shrinks with Herceptin treatment, but side effects can be tough. Researchers say a shorter course of the drug may be a good option.

About half of oncologists recommend medical marijuana to patients, though most feel ignorant of its proper medical use.

Diseases like cancer involve changes that occur inside a cell — and usually out of sight. A new technology can reveal a cell's inner workings, using inexpensive graphics processors from video games.

Ocular melanoma typically affects 6 out of every 1 million people, but doctors have found dozens of cases where the patients have connections to either Huntersville, N.C., or Auburn, Ala.

Research finds that more than two-thirds of lung cancer patients who received Keytruda plus chemotherapy would be alive a year later, compared with about half of people who only got chemotherapy.

Even big clinical studies can miss important drug side effects. Researchers, doctors and drugmakers are looking at patients' experiences posted on social media for clues on problems that were missed.

Scientists are trying to develop drugs to counteract an "undruggable" genetic variant that's responsible for about 30 percent of all cancer cases. It's high risk — high reward research.

More than a third of patients with cancer of the esophagus responded to experimental treatment in China with the gene-editing technique CRISPR. Several CRISPR studies are underway there.