In June 2020, I was seeing consults in the damp, windowless basement of a community hospital in North Carolina.
I accumulated some books I found interesting over the last several months, knowing I would eventually take time off on vacation and have a chance to delve into them more than my schedule normally allows.
In this country, we have museums devoted to natural history, culture, space exploration, sports, civil rights, and all manner of creative expression. But surprisingly, one of our nation’s most important human endeavors—the quest to translate scientific discoveries into medical advances—lacks a national venue that captures the drama of its story.
Cancer does not discriminate. It can affect poor and rich, old and young, ordinary people and celebrities, and people from all walks of life. The diagnosis of cancer is almost always unexpected, sudden, and shocking, independent of social status, education, or profession.
The Senate Appropriations Committee voted to provide significant increases to federal health agencies in fiscal year 2025, including raises of nearly $2 billion for NIH and $270 million for NCI.
By the end of 2022, Toni Monteiro had no fight left in her. She had been battling a rare blood cancer for three years. Her husband had just died. She was at risk of being evicted from her Washington, DC, apartment. Also, her heart was failing. “You’re really under stress,” Monteiro recalls her physician saying. […]
Allison Dowling knew a career in medicine wasn’t for her. She’d seen firsthand the pain and stress experienced by patients who didn’t have the wherewithal to navigate systemic barriers in health care—problems that often fall outside the jurisdiction of the clinic.
In her final year as a medical student, Francisca Finkel chose an elective rotation that is offered by few med schools: Working with lawyers to resolve non-medical issues that harm patients with cancer.
At its most recent meeting, the FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee focused on perioperative clinical trials, which the agency defined as neoadjuvant phase followed by surgery and continuing with adjuvant treatment using the same experimental agent (The Cancer Letter, July 26, 2024).
VOICES of Black Women, the largest population study of Black women in the United States, will be the first of American Cancer Society’s large-scale population studies to be initiated using an AI-driven data management platform—promising to bring observational cancer research out of the age of Excel data files and email sharing.
