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Tumor specimens from patients in a trial of cisplatin-based adjuvant chemotherapy for non–small-cell lung cancer were analyzed for the presence of ERCC1, an enzyme that participates in the repair of DNA damage caused by cisplatin. The absence of ERCC1 in the tumor was associated with a survival benefit from cisplatin-based adjuvant chemotherapy, whereas patients whose tumor expressed the enzyme failed to benefit from the chemotherapy. The absence of ERCC1 in the tumor was associated with a survival benefit from cisplatin-based adjuvant chemotherapy, whereas patients whose tumor expressed the enzyme failed to benefit from the chemotherapy. Lung cancer is a leading cause of death from cancer in most industrialized countries. 1 Despite undergoing complete resection of non–small-cell lung cancer, 33% of patients with pathological stage IA die within 5 years, as do 77% of those with pathological stage IIIA. 2 Clinical trials have tested the ability of adjuvant chemotherapy to improve survival after complete resection of non–small-cell lung cancer. The International Adjuvant Lung Cancer Trial (IALT) demonstrated an absolute benefit of 4.1% in 5-year overall survival among 1867 patients who were treated with adjuvant cisplatin-based chemotherapy. 3 Several other randomized studies have confirmed the benefit of postoperative platinum-based therapy . . .

This article analyzes the ways in which Wallace’s fiction stages homosocial intimacy between the (male) author figure and (male) reader through the conceptual metaphor of ghosts in both Infinite Jest and the unfinished novel The Pale King. I specifically contrast Wallace’s use of prosopopeia, or inducing the reader to create the author’s face in moments of undecidability, with that of one of his under-explored influences, Walt Whitman. Whitman used the technique to stage an intimate, homosexual encounter in the future between himself and his imagined, posthumous readership. Through this contrast, the article demonstrates that Wallace’s narrative devices are particularly attuned to the production of the intimacies of male homosocial desire. I borrow my meaning of this term from Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men (1985), in which she suggests that masculinity, by defining itself in opposition to male homosexuality, cannot acknowledge intimacy between heterosexual men as a manifestation of desire. Considering Wallace’s revisions of both the conceptual metaphor of ghosts as well as use of prosopopeia across both novels, the article argues that the homosocial intimacy staged between the masculinized author figure and his primarily, though not exclusively, white, heterosexual reading public is a fundamental effect of his aesthetic practice. However, the discontinuity between male homosocial desire and male homosexuality make this effect a too often unarticulated component of Wallace’s fiction and reception.

This essay puts into conversation two texts that negotiate the fantasy of space, flight, and Arab identity, specifically focused on the Lebanese diaspora: A. Naji Bakhti's debut novel Between Beirut and the Moon (2020) and superhero comics about the Lebanese American Green Lantern Simon Baz (2012–2021). Drawing on a history of how aerial surveys and perspectives inflicted the modernizing logic of empires in Lebanon, this essay argues that the visual modalities of empire are reinscribed in these texts' fantasies of flight. In Between Beirut and the Moon , Adam dreams of becoming an astronaut and flying to the moon, a fantasy itself deeply entrenched and complicated by the logics of empire. In Green Lantern (2011–2016) and Green Lanterns (2016–2018), Simon Baz offers a complicated fulfillment of Adam's childhood fantasy as the \"first Arab astronaut.\" Ultimately, while Simon's superpowers suggest the limitless, liberatory possibility of flight in the Lebanese imagination, in practice they reinforce many of the same restrictions that limit Adam's dream and necessitate his departure to England.

Paul S. Hirsch's Pulp Empire is an outstanding work of archival research on \"the power of trash, of the American comic book\" in empire-making (269). To demonstrate this, Pulp Empire excavates how, for example, commercial publishers and government agencies used anti-German and anti-Japanese narratives in comics to galvanize patriotic righteousness in the American project during World War II and, then, how the racist portrayals of nonwhite characters grounded in this tradition became a global embarrassment that threatened appeals to American cultural hegemony during the Cold War. [...]chapter 7 details how \"the first wave of Marvel superheroes straddled the cultural space between over propaganda comic books and commercial titles … [and achieved] a unique and powerful combination of sophistication and emotion that effectively masked their more over pro–Cold War perspectives\" (246).

BackgroundCirculating tumor DNA (ctDNA) is a promising intermediate end point for oncology drug development, potentially accelerating regulatory approvals by providing early insights into treatment response. However, challenges remain in standardizing ctDNA assessment, including optimal blood collection timing and defining molecular response (MR) cutoffs. The ctDNA for Monitoring Treatment Response (ctMoniTR) project, led by Friends of Cancer Research, aggregates patient-level data from clinical trials to evaluate associations between ctDNA changes and overall survival (OS).MethodsThis analysis included four randomized clinical trials of patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (aNSCLC) treated with either anti-programmed death (ligand) 1 (anti-PD(L)1) therapy (with or without chemotherapy) or chemotherapy alone. MR was assessed using three predefined per cent-change thresholds in ctDNA levels (≥50% decrease, ≥90% decrease, and 100% clearance). ctDNA samples were analyzed at two timepoints: an early window (T1, up to 7 weeks post-treatment initiation) and a later window (T2, 7–13 weeks post-treatment initiation). Multivariable Cox proportional hazards models and time-dependent analyses were used to evaluate associations between ctDNA changes and OS.ResultsA total of 918 patients were included. In the anti-PD(L)1 group, ctDNA reductions at both T1 and T2 were significantly associated with improved OS across all MR thresholds. In the chemotherapy group, associations were weaker at T1 but became more pronounced at T2. Patients with MR at both T1 and T2 had the strongest OS associations. Overall, the results suggest that T2 had marginally stronger association with OS than T1.ConclusionsThis study supports the potential of ctDNA as an intermediate end point in aNSCLC, with MR at both early (T1) and later (T2) timepoints showing significant associations with OS. Differences in ctDNA dynamics between treatment modalities highlight the importance of considering the timing of blood collection. Further research is needed to determine the optimal time window for assessing ctDNA response. Prospective trials and trial-level meta-analyses will be critical to validating ctDNA as a regulatory-grade intermediate end point for oncology drug development.

Though the medium of the novel may seem anachronistic for a Black liberation movement founded by three queer Black women—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and Opal Tometi—on Twitter, the stunning blockbuster success of Angie Thomas's 2017 debut novel The Hate U Giverepresents a high-water mark for an already-rich archive of what we might label BLM novels.1A fictionalized representation of the precipitating events and formation of BLM, the retrospective quality of this realist novel offers an opportunity to reflect on the novelistic strategies pursued by African American novelists since the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and to interrogate which formal commitments and affective states best align with and provoke the Movement's radical imaginary. While similarities in content are evident in a survey of these novels (nearly all, for example, focalize from the perspective of young Black adults and feature violent and sometimes fatal confrontations with police officers), there is significant diversity in the novelistic strategies and forms these works undertake.2When measured against the now fully developed Movement for Black Lives platform, fissures between some novelistic strategies and the Movement become visible, whereas others demonstrate the potentiality of the novel to expand and animate the politics of Black liberation. More specifically, the conservative impulses I will identify inThe Hate U Giveas compared to the Movement's political objectives, in terms of race and even gender and sexuality, are embedded in the conservatism of its commitment to the historical form of literary realism.3In contrast, experimentations on linearity and fictionality like we see in Kiese Laymon's 2013 debut speculative novelLong Division, which I see as the first contribution to this growing and impressive archive, not only connects more closely to the politics of the Movement, but also offers it an aesthetic, if also dissonant, vision for Black liberation. Through a comparative analysis ofThe Hate U Give's realist construction of empathy andLong Division's speculative strategy of collective revision and queer love, this article assesses the aesthetic and political potential of novels that claim a relation to the BLM movement and outlines what different and successful forms the BLM novel can and should adopt.

Background The most appropriate management for patients with stage IV ovarian cancer remains unclear. Our objective was to understand the main determinants associated with survival and to discuss best surgical management. Methods Data of 1038 patients with confirmed ovarian cancer treated between 1996 and 2016 were extracted from maintained databases of 7 French referral gynecologic oncology institutions. Patients with stage IV diseases were selected for further analysis. The Kaplan–Meier method was used to estimate the survival distribution. A Cox proportional hazards model including all the parameters statistically significant in univariable analysis, was used to account for the influence of multiple variables. Results Two hundred and eight patients met our inclusion criteria: 65 (31.3%) never underwent debulking surgery, 52 (25%) underwent primary debulking surgery (PDS) and 91 (43.8%) neoadjuvant chemotherapy and interval debulking surgery (NACT-IDS). Patients not operated had a significantly worse overall survival than patients that underwent PDS or NACT–IDS (p < 0.001). In multivariable analysis, three factors were independent predictors of survival: upfront surgery (HR 0.32 95% CI 0.14–0.71, p = 0.005), postoperative residual disease = 0 (HR 0.37 95% CI 0.18–0.75, p = 0.006) and association of Carboplatin and Paclitaxel regimen (HR 0.45 95% CI 0.25–0.80, p = 0.007). Conclusions Presence of distant metastases should not refrain surgeons from performing radical procedures, whenever the patient is able to tolerate. Maximal surgical efforts should be done to minimize residual disease as it is the main determinant of survival.

In Novelistic Intimacies, I consider the political and aesthetic structure of intimacy in a diverse set of narrative forms produced in the so-called digital age, or the late age of print—from encyclopedic and metafictional novels to graphic storytelling and Afrofuturist fantasy. As an organizing principle, intimacy forces us to consider, at once, how novelists have attempted to restore language and narrative with personal meaning after postmodernism—often termed New Sincerity or post-irony. At the same time, intimacy allows us to see how novelists have experimented on the materiality of the book and the eroticism of language to invent new, impersonal modes of storytelling in the present. In this way, I think about reading and writing in contemporary fiction affectively, as acting on both the body and the mind. This requires that I consider these novels as material objects in the world. How do they circulate? How and why do readers engage with and activate them in the present? I argue that, in the late age of print, readers have particular bodily, physical, and sensual orientations towards books themselves. In different ways, each of the novels chosen manipulates the reader’s orientation towards the book as an object as a fundamental component of their aesthetic practice. And, I argue that part of the reason these manipulations are effective is because of a broader history of the book and the ways in which deep-seated habits and memories coalesce around and inform how readers engage with books. In doing so, I examine the contemporary novel in the context of a longer history of the book as an erotic threat and/or tool, looking backwards to literary figures like Samuel Richardson, Walt Whitman, and W.E.B. Du Bois to illuminate the aesthetic techniques of these contemporary storytellers. Beginning with an interrogation of the unacknowledged homosocial intimacy between men staged by one of the popular originators of New Sincerity, David Foster Wallace, I develop an alternative account of literary production in the late age of print. Through close readings of the works of Wallace, his contemporary A.M. Homes, the graphic auteur Chris Ware, and #BlackLivesMatter activist Kiese Laymon, I analyze the ways in which intimacy—filtered through the categories of race, gender, and sexuality—undergird and determine the relationships between the reader, narrative, and the book.