The worldwide spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) presents unprecedented challenges to the cancer care delivery system.
This story is part of The Cancer Letter's ongoing coverage of COVID-19's impact on oncology. A full list of our coverage, as well as the latest meeting cancellations, is available here.As COVID-19 has now officially been declared a source of the pandemic, with increasing incidence across the nation, it is without question that the needs of patients with particular vulnerabilities should garner particular attention.
When the Lung-MAP trial was launched in June 2014, the goal was simple: Make drug development faster and more collaborative—and do it for lung cancer, the leading cause of cancer death in the United States.This is a formidable challenge. Cancer trials were, and remain, notoriously time-consuming to launch, expensive to run, and difficult to enroll patients to. A deeper understanding of cancer biology and the genomics revolution in medicine have changed how we approach clinical research.When the Lung-MAP trial was launched in June 2014, the goal was simple: Make drug development faster and more collaborative—and do it for lung cancer, the leading cause of cancer death in the United States.
As I look through just-published tables of age-adjusted cancer mortality, I recognize an unprecedented development:
The ink hadn't dried on the headline of the lead story in the Dec. 29 issue of The New York Times when on Jan. 2 HHS Secretary Alex Azar and newly arrived FDA Commissioner Stephen M. Hahn made the following announcement:
Since March 2018, P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), an organization founded in 2017 by photographer Nan Goldin, has held demonstrations at art museums in New York, Washington, DC, Boston, London and Paris to protest their acceptance of money from the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, a company that been accused of fomenting the prescription opioid addiction crisis.
One day in 1996, in my role as chief science correspondent for NBC News, I was rummaging through the usual huge (pre-internet) pile of press releases on my desk and zeroed in on one: a phase III trial of a treatment for an aggressive type of breast cancer that was desperate to accrue volunteers.
The initial reports of the near-miraculous benefits of CAR-T in pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia generated tremendous excitement—there was a Lazarus-like quality to these stories.
Soon after the Chernobyl accident, while caring for victims at Moscow's Hospital No. 6, I commented: “In a nuclear age, an accident anywhere is an accident everywhere.”
Almost 35 years ago, while the nation suffered in the vicious grip of the HIV epidemic, a young man from South Carolina with AIDS named Boyd Helton found his way to the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda. While there, he was recruited into a clinical research protocol designed to lower the expression of viral proteins in his blood, and, ideally, to increase the numbers of his circulating CD4+ T-cells.
