Vice President Joe Biden and the National Cancer Moonshot Task Force published their final reports Oct. 17, summarizing the moonshot's achievements, and outlining five strategic goals and action plans for the years to come.
Kudos to The Cancer Letter's report on the 803 PD-1 or PD-L1 trials. As Rick Pazdur noted, that is just too many resources chasing the same idea for adult cancer studies.
The NCI Bypass Budget was expected to be made public on Oct. 6.
Question 1: Is there a reason to believe that these drugs are different from each other?Abrams & Sharon: From our estimate, there are more than 700 trials on ClinicalTrials.gov, with the bulk of those trials (approximately 700) involving agents from the five leading PD-1/PD-L1 companies (Merck, BMS, AZ, Genentech, and EMD Serono/Pfizer). There are obviously some subtle differences in terms of agents that target PD-1 versus PD-L1, but by and large, if there is efficacy with one agent seen, then we have generally seen a similar range of efficacy with the other agents.
Pharmaceutical companies are betting big on cancer immunotherapies that rely on the PD-1 protein and its ligands, PD-L1 and PD-L2, to initiate an immune response.
NCI has suspended re-competition of the the $400 million-a-year operations and technical support contract for the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research.
A continuing resolution passed Congress passed Sept. 28 will avoid a government shutdown and fund federal agencies through Dec. 9.
Two of the nation's biggest nonprofit health systems—Dignity Health and Catholic Health Initiatives—launched a precision medicine program that has the potential to create the largest collection of clinical cancer data ever compiled by a single organization.
The National Cancer Moonshot Initiative is not slated to receive funding in fiscal 2017—neither the House nor Senate appropriations bill includes the $680 million the White House proposed for Vice President Joe Biden's project.
Dan Sargent, one of the world's foremost experts in oncology clinical trials, died unexpectedly on Sept. 22. Sargent died from an acute illness, Mayo officials said. He was 46.
