The publication by Ian M. Thompson and colleagues in last week's New England Journal of Medicine regarding long term follow-up of patients in the NCI-sponsored Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial (PCPT) marks a good opportunity to review and reflect on the history of the trial and the past 30 years of prostate cancer medicine.
Prostate cancer is the most common solid tumor in men. It has been estimated that 60-75 percent of men will have histologic evidence of prostate cancer during their lifetime and that 2-4 percent of men will die of the disease. African American men are at a greater risk of diagnosis and death.
On Jan. 2, my friend and long-time mentor Waun Ki Hong passed away. In thinking about what Ki did for me personally and the impact he had on the lives and professional careers of so many people, I pulled out a speech I gave at his retirement celebration at MD Anderson on Aug. 15, 2014. I was struck that even in his passing so many of my thoughts ring true today. Perhaps this will give readers of The Cancer Letter a sense of the man.
Breast cancer research is big business. And the incentives in that business are designed to benefit industry, doctors and institutions, leaving patients behind. In 2018 alone, about $1 billion federal dollars were invested in institutions around the country to fund research.
On the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday, FDA delivered a flurry of decisions: approvals for two therapies—venetoclax and glasdegib—to treat a deadly form of blood cancer called acute myeloid leukemia (AML), and a priority review designation for another therapy—quizartinib—to treat the same disease. A fourth therapy to treat AML—gilteritinib—received an FDA approval on Nov. 28.
Oct. 25, we heard more about President Trump's plan to save health care dollars through a variety of Medicare pilot programs and index pricing.
The year was 1998, location, Italian Alps. Jim and I were attending an intimate Pezcoller meeting organized by David Livingston. At that meeting, Jim presented something I had never seen in the entirety of my career—the eradication of cancer in mice following treatment with an antibody designed to inhibit a T cell checkpoint mechanism.
THE CHECKPOINTS were born in 2007 on an escalator in Chicago. Here's the story…
In May 2018, President Trump announced his plan to lower drug prices. “We will have tougher negotiation, more competition, and much lower prices at the pharmacy counter. And it will start to take effect very soon,” he promised. The plan is outlined in a 40-page document by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services titled “American Patients First—The Trump Administration Blueprint to Lower Drug Prices and Reduce Out-of-Pocket Cost.” (1)
The fight against sexual misconduct in the workplace has transcended Hollywood and become a major issue across industries.
