EUROPEAN ONCOLOGY & HAEMATOLOGY – VOLUME 10 ISSUE 2 – WINTER 2014

Welcome to the winter edition of European Oncology & Haematology, i>which features a wide variety of articles covering several topics. We begin with some worrying statistics regarding fertility preservation after breast cancer, in an article by Brauten-Smith. A survey has revealed that around 5,000 younger women are missing out on fertility care, despite being at […]

Every year nearly 55,000 people are diagnosed with invasive and in situ breast cancer in the UK:1 around 5,600 are younger women, aged 45 and under. This group of women have specific information needs and to address this Breast Cancer Care has developed Standards of Care for Younger Women.2 To prioritise these standards, Breast Cancer […]

It was estimated that more than 429,000 new cases of urothelial cancer (UC) were diagnosed worldwide in 2012.1 There are limited treatments for locally advanced, unresectable, metastatic, platinum refractory UC.2 As a single agent, doxorubicin has a response rate of 17 % in patients with previously treated and untreated advanced bladder cancer. Complete responses (CRs) […]

We present a 21-year-old Somalian male, who grew up in the UK, who presented initially to the urology department at a London university hospital with a 4-month history of two penile lesions. These lesions were located in the glans penis and had gradually enlarged, with concomitant bleeding and purulent discharge. In addition, the patient mentioned […]

The myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) are a heterogeneous group of haematological disorders characterised by ineffective haematopoiesis with associated cytopenias and a hypercellular bone marrow (BM) with dysplastic changes.1 Patients with MDS have a variable reduction in the production of normal red blood cells (RBCs), platelets, and mature granulocytes. This often results in a variety of systemic […]

Despite advances in multimodality treatment, the 5-year survival rate of patients with locally advanced head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) does not exceed 40–50% and survival rates for recurrent or metastatic disease (R/M) remain dismal.1,2 Low survival rates in combination with significant toxicities caused by current treatment strategies used in HNSCC emphasise the necessity […]

Delineation of contours remains the one part of radiotherapy that is completely manual in the majority of centres and therefore the potential for time-saving is huge,1 being estimated to range from 23 %2 to 41 %.3 One of the additional benefits of auto-contouring is the reduction in interobserver variation, which in general is not quantified […]

Molecular profiling is becoming undoubtedly more and more part of the workup of cancer patients. The fact that tumour profiling is not restricted anymore, to be used within the scientific frame to upgrade the level of stratification in clinical trials or to test whether the integration of this methodology, will even allow individualisation of cancer […]

There has been much discussion in the cancer community around socalled ‘personalised medicine’. Controversy exists over its definition and about the likely impact personalised medicines will have on patients of different settings, genetic backgrounds and resources. There are also different names proposed: personalised medicine, precision medicine, molecular medicine and targeted therapies are some of them, […]

Development and Registration of Biosimilars Biopharmaceuticals can now be marketed when the relevant patents have expired: they are therefore a subset of biopharmaceuticals with comparable safety and efficacy to originator reference products, referred to as biosimilars. The main difference between approved biosimilars and the reference product is that biosimilars will be less expensive. It is […]

The current treatment for most cancerous growths consists of surgery, radio- and chemotherapy or combinations. The underlying rationales for those options remains, therefore, virtually unaltered since, respectively, the times of the Pharaohs.1 Emil Grubbe irradiated the first breast cancer in 18962 and mustard gas variants were first used therapeutically in 1946.3 These three strategies have […]