cancer

Rapid medical advances, as well as growing volumes of health and mortality data, are transforming cancer risk assessment. RGA's Neil Parkin explores our deepening understanding and insurance implications.  

Complicated pathology reports can contain significant amounts of genetic information. It has become vital for insurance company medical directors, underwriters, and claims professionals to understand "driver mutations" present in, or absent from, a tumor's genome, well as targeted therapies and their mechanisms. This article will examine how genetics contributes to cancer development, treatment, and prognosis.

We began 2018 with some promising news on cancer: A simple blood test can now detect disease in eight common sites. Called the CancerSEEK test, it was developed at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, and may herald a new age in cancer medicine

Fewer Americans are getting cancer, and more of those who do are surviving the disease, according to a new study.

Traditionally, cancer is treated by surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy. However, some of the most exciting breakthroughs are now being made using another type of treatment called immunotherapy. This treatment is well established in other medical conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and allergic asthma. Numerous sources now declare immunotherapy to be a “game-changer” in cancer treatment and we will discuss that here.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) was created more than 50 years ago to foster global collaboration on cancer control. Today more effective therapies mean mortality rates no longer reflect incidence rates; there are now more cancer survivors partly due to advances that enable early diagnosis.

This article reviews the recent and unprecedented acceleration in the understanding of cancer pathophysiology which has led to the subsequent development of novel cancer immunotherapies. In part, this new direction in cancer treatment has been advanced by a greater understanding of individual patient genomics and has contributed to the realization of the so-called “precision medicine” era.