Patients for whom there are no existing treatments watch with desperation as a potentially helpful new drug spends years working its way from a lab bench, through clinical trials, and finally to the FDA, where reviewers consider it for approval.
It's been a long time since we've seen the kind of strong national commitment that exists today to support medical research.
If enacted, the proposed budget reduction of $5.8 billion to the National Institutes of Health will slow research, deprive patients afflicted with cancer of hope, and deliver a devastating blow to our science workforce and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. This proposed reduction directly counters the wisdom of the U.S. Congress, who less than a year ago overwhelmingly passed the 21st Century Cures Act.
This week, the USPSTF issued its draft guidelines for prostate cancer screening. They propose shifting from task force's recommendation against routine prostate cancer screening to a recommendation for informed and shared decision-making in which the physician and patient discuss the real risks of harm and the potential for life saving benefit before deciding on screening.
Oncologists must confront end-of-life issues on a nearly daily basis. Our approach to the potential death of a patient may change over time, however, depending on the patients' diagnosis and stage, where those patients are in their treatment plan, and, of course, what the patients' wishes are. When feasible, our primary goal is to prevent death from cancer, and when we cannot achieve that, we try to delay death as long as we can. When dying seems inevitable, we do our best to make it as comfortable as possible.
Many cancer center hospital systems are expanding their services across large geographic regions, while cancer care is consolidating around ever enlarging groups.
Announcing the NCI Formulary, the Jan. 13 issue of The Cancer Letter includes comments suggesting the road to new therapies will now get “easier” and other comments indicated that industry and/or NCI collaborators will “not provide support other than drug access”.
For nearly a half century, much of the “war on cancer” has been fought at NCI-designated cancer centers, the 69 major medical schools and free-standing research institutes have this designation.
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.
Vice President Joe Biden's National Cancer Moonshot Initiative has touched off an unprecedented national and international dialogue about cancer.
