Rick Pazdur, MD, the newly appointed director for the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the FDA, has been described as “greyhound thin” as a result of his dedication to cycling and lifting weights in the gym each day and, for a long time, a vegetarian diet. I first met him when he was the director of the Office of Oncology Drug Products (ODP) within CDER, in 2009.
Rick Pazdur’s appointment as director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) comes at exactly the right moment, both for the agency and for the patients it serves.
To say that it has been an eventful few months for George Tidmarsh would be a bit of an understatement.
Research1 has shown that delivering tumor profiling results to cancer patients prior to initiation of treatment and connecting patients harboring an actionable oncogenic mutation with the right targeted therapy can deliver superior patient outcomes. To fulfill this promise of precision medicine, we need to ensure more targeted therapies are available to patients who need them. Fortunately, this work is well underway.
Study finds no correlation between cancer burden in catchment areas and cancer centers’ CCSG funding
When the idea of looking at cancer center funding and the cancer burden of cancer center catchment areas came to us in the summer of 2024, we lived in a different context.
Cancer care is evolving at an unprecedented pace. Practitioners feel the mounting pressures daily: rising cancer rates—particularly in younger patients—a growing population of older cancer survivors, rapid growth in new care and treatment options, and navigating heightened fiscal constraints and uncertainty.
As every non-profit organization knows, it is our obligation to be purpose-driven. Most NPO founders and the people who work for them have been thrown into this space as a result of life experiences. It is our passion rather than a job to simply collect a paycheck.
In recent months, federal policies have stripped away funding for research on sexual and gender minoritized (SGM) communities and blocked the collection of data related to gender.
Fiscal and strategic uncertainty abound at our leading academic medical centers. Job cuts to hospital staff (University of Southern California), research nurses (Vanderbilt) and librarians (Duke) are changing the landscape of our leading centers.
There is a silent crisis in cancer research that underpins nearly all aspects of the work we do to combat this disease.
