“There is more brain power in this room than exists in many countries,” said Vice President Joe Biden, addressing over 4,000 members of the American Association for Cancer Research, during a speech that turned personal at times, as he laid out several suggestions for accelerating progress.
As head of the federal government’s cancer moonshot task force, the vice president listed recommendations he has received for reaching the initiative’s goal, not a cure, but completion of a decade’s worth of cancer research in five years. Recommendations include increasing research budgets across the federal government, making it easier to share data, removing paywalls around published research, and incentivizing verification of study results.
“Toward that end, last year, the 2016 budget, and working with Congress, we were able to increase funding by $2 billion for the National Institutes of Health. The largest increase in a decade,” Biden said at the association’s annual meeting April 20 in New Orleans.
 | Comparison with AstraZeneca Drug Hard to Ignore as ODAC Votes Down NSCLC Application from Clovis A phase III trial will be needed to determine approvability of the Clovis Oncology Inc. agent rociletinib for the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer, the FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee recommended. At a meeting April 12, ODAC in effect voted against granting an accelerated approval of rociletinib for the treatment of patients with mutant epidermal growth factor receptor non-small cell lung cancer who have been previously treated with an EGFR-targeted therapy and have the EGFR T790M mutation as detected by an FDA approved test. |
| Guest Editorial Thirty Years after Chernobyl: Lessons Learned By Robert Peter Gale April 26 marks the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear power facility accident in the former Soviet Union. Soon after the accident, I received a call from the Soviet ambassador to the U.S. on behalf of Mikhail Gorbachev asking me to come immediately to Moscow. The world (but not Soviet citizens) had been following the spread of a radioactive cloud over Europe for several days and I offered the Soviet government access to advanced medical technologies I knew they lacked. I arrived to find about 205 of the most seriously-affected victims had been flown to Hospital 6 in Moscow connected to the Institute for Biophysics. |
| AACR 2016 – In Brief Nancy Davidson was inaugurated as president of the American Association for Cancer Research for 2016-2017 at the association’s annual meeting in New Orleans. Davidson is the director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. She also serves as associate vice chancellor for cancer research; the Hillman professor of oncology; a distinguished professor of medicine and pharmacology and chemical biology; and a professor in the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Her research focuses on clinical and translational breast cancer research and cancer biology and treatment. Also: |
| Academy of Arts and Sciences Elects 213 Members The American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected 213 new members, including some of the world’s most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists, as well as civic, business, and philanthropic leaders. |
| BSA Approves Plan to Expand SEER Infrastructure, Funding, and Research Support Capacity The NCI Board of Scientific Advisors approved a proposal to expand the infrastructure and capacity of the SEER program, including introducing registries designed specifically to support cancer research projects, an increase of the program’s overall budget, and moving toward a more advanced, uniform data management system. The new structure of the surveillance program would create core registries, selected through a competition of the U.S. central cancer registries, which would then collect the most comprehensive data to be used for SEER statistics and public use. |
| | Cell Therapy Production, Patient Accrual Suspended at Rosenberg’s Lab at NCI NIH has suspended the facilities that produce investigational compounds for an NCI laboratory engaged in cell therapy production and a National Institute of Mental Health facility producing positron emission tomography materials. As a result, no new new patients will be enrolled in affected trials until the issues are resolved, NIH said in a press release. |
| | Drugs and Targets
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