Newswise — Chicago (May 6, 2013): The Executive Committee of the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) recently announced that Mahul B. Amin, MD, FCAP, has been named Editor-in-Chief of the upcoming eighth edition of the AJCC Cancer Staging Manual. Dr. Amin is currently chairman and professor of the department of pathology and laboratory medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles.
“We’re excited to have Dr. Amin lead the editorial development of this latest edition,” said David P. Winchester, MD, FACS, Medical Director, American College of Surgeons Cancer Programs. “He brings a multidisciplinary approach to the editor-in-chief position, in addition to a molecular-based medical perspective of cancer staging. These approaches are important since, for this latest edition, we’re stabilizing anatomic staging and expanding the focus on personalized medicine using molecular markers.”
Considered by many to be the gold standard reference for cancer staging, the AJCC Cancer Staging Manual is used by physicians and health care professionals throughout the world to facilitate the uniform description of neoplastic diseases. The manual brings together evidence-based criteria for the staging of cancer for a number of anatomic disease sites, which includes the rationale and rules for staging; the definitions of tumor, lymph node involvement, and metastasis; stage groupings; and histologic grade.
The eighth edition of the Cancer Staging Manual–which is expected to be published in late 2015 for patients diagnosed with cancer after January 2016–will incorporate advances made in cancer research, staging, diagnosis, and treatment since the seventh edition was published in October 2009. The editorial development process will involve a collaboration of more than 500 cancer experts from around the world, and will cover more than 60 primary disease sites. In addition, the manual will have a new publisher: Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins, part of Wolters-Kluwer Health—chosen for their ability to publish in both print and electronic formats.
“There have been enormous advances in cancer diagnosis, staging, and treatment since the results of the Human Cancer Genome Project were first announced more than a decade ago,” Dr. Amin said. “As a result, we can better predict the level of cancer risk and tailor a more personalized treatment program for the patient. For the eighth edition, we will incorporate these newer precision medicine paradigms, as appropriate, into the more traditional anatomic extent of disease premise of the AJCC staging classification. Each day cancer treatment is increasingly becoming a team approach of surgical oncologists, medical oncologists, radiation oncologists, pathologists, radiologists, and other medical personnel,” added Dr. Amin. “These specialists all work together to tackle the cancer problem and use the AJCC system as the universal language in which cancer is communicated. So, for the new edition of the cancer staging manual, we want to make our staging system more relevant for both the treating physicians at the individual level as well as the surveillance community at the population level.”
About Dr. Mahul B. Amin
Dr. Amin is a national and international expert and consultant in tumors of the genitourinary tract including prostate, urinary bladder, kidney, and testis. He earned his medical degree from G.S. Medical College and King Edward Memorial Hospital in Bombay, India. He was on the Executive Committee of the AJCC from 2003 to 2011. Dr. Amin is an internationally renowned educator and serves on the faculty of numerous educational courses offered at the annual meetings of the American Urology Association, the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathologists, and the College of American Pathologists. He is a coauthor of the current World Health Organization’s classification systems for urothelial tumors and renal neoplasms. His scientific interests are in the discovery and validation of biomarkers in urologic malignancies for clinical personalized medicine.
About the American Joint Committee on Cancer
The AJCC was established in 1959 to formulate and publish systems of classification of cancer, including staging and end-results reporting, that will be acceptable to and used by the medical profession for selecting the most effective treatment, determining prognosis, and continuing evaluation of cancer control measures. The AJCC is composed of 18 member organizations, and its activities are administered by the Chicago-based American College of Surgeons.
# # # Note to Editors: A photo of Dr. Amin is available from the Office of Public Information of the American College of Surgeons, email: [email protected], call: 312-202-5328.
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