Diagnosis & Disease Information

Senior couple consulting with a doctor via telemedicine

Zoom Medicine: An Apt Metaphor in 2020

The practice of medicine is to the life sciences what finance and economics are to the mathematical disciplines. Both are wedged between STEM subjects and the humanities requiring skills emanating from both the right and left brain. Read any student’s application to medical school or residency program as they explain why medicine’s intersection of science…

Kidney Failure Undertreatment International Concern

The COVID-19 Pandemic Proves the World Is Small

The rapid spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID- 19) caught the world by surprise. Whatever becomes the new normal, the United States will be a different country from what it was on March 13, when President Donald J. Trump declared a national emergency. At this writing on May 28, more than 100,000 people in the…

asian woman looking through a microscope

Basic Science: The Tail That Wags the RCC Dog

I recently had reason to survey the progress made in renal cell cancer (RCC) over the last 70 or more years. In 1950, a patient who presented with metastatic RCC had a 0%-5% overall response rate (ORR) to the therapies of the time, with an anticipated overall survival (OS) of approximately 10 months. By 2005,…

That Nebulous Concept Called Standard of Care

During a session at the 2019 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium (GUCS) held recently in San Francisco, researchers presented findings from phase 3 studies showing that immunotherapy-based combination regimens are superior to sunitinib alone at improving progression-free survival among patients with previously untreated advanced kidney cancer. One study demonstrated improved overall survival. The study presenters concluded that…

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