The future of American health care, pandemic response, and sustained funding for cancer research hangs in the balance as the final votes are being counted and legal challenges launched in the 2020 presidential election.
No prizes should be handed out to anyone who predicted that:
As the rancor in Washington continues to escalate from bickering to a war on many fronts, the deadline approaches for the end of a continuing resolution that keeps the federal government open until Jan. 19.
League tables like those published by U.S. News and World Report should probably be taken with a pinch of salt in any case, but it is the self-marketing of these tables that is just a bit problematic.
After a year of trying to understand the biology and politics of cancer, Vice President Joe Biden admits that he has a stronger grasp on the nuts and bolts of Washington than the evolutionary mysteries known collectively as cancer.
Reform of the FDA oncology program is emerging as the immediately tangible element of the Obama administration's moonshot program.
The National Cancer Institute Harold Varmus will leave on March 31 is leaner, cleaner, and more focused than it was on July 12, 2010, the day he became its 14th director.
On Jan. 9, 2015, The Cancer Letter reported that Duke University received information in early 2008 that called into question the validity of the methodology and results published by the Anil Potti research group. Potti, along with his mentor and co-author Joseph Nevins, had galvanized the world of cancer research in 2006 and 2007 with their reports of successful gene expression tests for directing cancer therapy, the “holy grail” of cancer research. The 2008 information came in the form of a letter from a third-year medical student, Brad Perez, who was working in Potti's lab. The letter, which does not seem to have been given any credence at the time, described with precision the problems that eventually resulted in the termination of clinical trials and the subsequent retractions, beginning in 2011, of at least ten (and counting) papers from major scientific journals.
Does Myriad have rights to BRCA2?The race to find mutations associated with inherited risk of breast cancer started with Mary-Claire King's announcement of linkage to chromosome 17 in fall 1990. As Kevin Davies documented in his book Breakthrough, it is widely accepted that the team led by Mark Skolnick of the University of Utah and Myriad Genetics won that race to find BRCA1. They cloned and sequenced the gene and identified the first high-risk variants several months ahead of King and other rival groups in the UK, France and the United States. Utah/Myriad filed the first patent applications on BRCA1.
Patent litigation is a blood sport if you see corporations as people and count spilled ink or loss of money as hemorrhage.
