Last week’s issue of The Cancer Letter included an obituary that the entire staff at The Cancer Letter had been dreading for years: Abdallah Abou Zahr, an oncologist at Roger Maris Cancer Center in Fargo, ND, died Jan. 23 of a liposarcoma after a five-year battle with the disease.
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Abou Zahr’s story had become personal for The Cancer Letter. In February 2024, an intimate story of how cancer hijacked his family’s future—and of how his colleagues and community rallied around him—became one of the magazine’s most read articles. His family’s story highlights the heartbreaking reality that even those who work in oncology are not immune to the devastating personal and financial impacts of cancer.
On this week’s episode of The Cancer Letter Podcast, Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter, and Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor, reflect on Abou Zahr’s experience with cancer—as an oncologist, a caregiver, and, ultimately, a patient with terminal disease.
Abou Zahr’s obituary was published last week alongside a story about the fate of the fiscal year 2026 funding bill, which was still uncertain at the time. As of Feb. 3, the FY26 funding bill has been passed by Congress and signed by President Trump. Paul and Jacquelyn talk about how important it is for The Cancer Letter, even as a trade publication, to consistently highlight real patients and their stories.
“When we do those stories, they’re the most read stories of the year or years,” Paul said. “That is one thing they all have in common.”
“They’re resonant; right?” Jacquelyn said. “I think it is important that we kind of circle back to that every once in a while, even if that isn’t necessarily our coverage area technically. We’re not necessarily a general publication, but I think we have to keep circling back to that and returning to that because that is the whole point.”
“It’s for the soul,” Paul said.
Stories mentioned in this podcast include:
- Abdallah Abou Zahr, an oncologist whose cancer story resonated widely, dies of liposarcoma at 42
- An oncologist navigates terminal sarcoma, insurmountable debt, and “a legacy of grief”
- FY26 funding package blocked in Senate after ICE shooting of Alex Pretti
- The Directors: Gary Schwartz and Ramon Parsons on the best of times (for science), the worst of times (for funding)
- Les Biller: Supportive cancer care is the smart investment our leaders in Washington can’t afford to ignore
This episode was transcribed using transcription services. It has been reviewed by our editorial staff, but the transcript may be imperfect.
The following is a transcript of this week’s In the Headlines, a weekly series on The Cancer Letter Podcast:
Jacquelyn Cobb: This week on The Cancer Letter Podcast…
Oftentimes when I tell people that I work as a reporter that covers oncology, people assume that that’s really all I do. Is really, really sad stories just constantly. And I have to say, no, that’s pretty rare, but it does happen and it is devastating. I couldn’t do them all day, every day. I would be very sad.
Paul Goldberg: But weirdly, and that shouldn’t lead us to do things differently, but weirdly, when we do those stories, they’re the most read stories of the year or years. There’s one story that just keeps popping up as the most read story.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Is that Beth Carner?
Paul Goldberg: Yeah, years and years. And there’s a few others, but that is one thing they all have in common.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. Well, I mean, they’re resonant, right? I think it is important that we kind of circle back to that every once in a while, even if that isn’t necessarily our coverage area technically. We’re not necessarily a general publication, but I think we have to keep circling back to that and returning to that because that is the whole point.
Paul Goldberg: It’s for the soul.
Jacquelyn Cobb: For the soul. Exactly.
Paul Goldberg: You’re listening to The Cancer Letter Podcast. The Cancer Letter is a weekly independent magazine covering oncology since 1973. I’m your host, Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter.
Jacquelyn Cobb: And I’m your host, Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor of The Cancer Letter. We’ll be bringing you the latest stories, groundbreaking research and critical conversations shaping oncology.
Paul Goldberg: So let’s get going.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Hi everyone, just a quick update before we jump in. We recorded this episode on Monday, Feb. 2. Since then, the House passed the FY26 funding package, and President Trump signed it into law. President Trump’s signature, which came late on Tuesday, Feb. 3, officially ended the short partial government shutdown. Most federal agencies are now funded through the end of the fiscal year, but the fight over Homeland Security is not over. DHS and ICE were only funded temporarily through mid-February through a continuing resolution, and so while the shutdown is over and HHS has its funding set until the end of the fiscal year, the underlying clash over immigration enforcement and oversight is still very much alive in Washington.
With that, enjoy the episode!
Hi, Paul. How are you?
Paul Goldberg: Hi, Jacquelyn. How are you? I hope you had a wonderful weekend. I hear you had a ski fall.
Jacquelyn Cobb: I have a little boo-boo. I don’t know if you can see it. It’s very miserable to me. As my father would say, it’s very severe. It’s very acute. It’s very bad. No, but I did quite fall on my face. I think I was trying to work on my form on a little green, nice, gentle slope, and I tried to get my legs closer, my feet closer together, but I just don’t have the ankle stability yet to do that well. And so they just got caught. I went forward, my ski came off, my poles went flying. Someone came down and helped me. It was very nice. Very green coated.
And yeah, okay. I’m just going to be dramatic for one second. I’m sorry. But this is not a scrape. Okay? This tiny little thing is just from the impact of my goggles hitting my face and it’s like popped blood vessels. And I’m swollen.
Paul Goldberg: Well, all I can say is that it is always better to fall on your face personally and physically as opposed to professionally or spiritually.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Wow. That was surprisingly wise. Yeah, I wasn’t really prepared. I was expecting a joke.
Paul Goldberg: No. Well, maybe it was a little bit of a—but I was cross country skiing because the mountain was a mess as always is.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Was the cross country skiing nice though? You’re in Vermont, you’ve been waiting for this.
Paul Goldberg: Yeah, it was gorgeous. It was our first day in. We made it here in front of the storm.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Nice.
Paul Goldberg: And there was no storm actually, as far as I can tell. I don’t know. I haven’t looked. Not that kind of storms. But political, sure. Physical.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Spiritual.
Paul Goldberg: Yeah, it was great. We took dogs out through the notch. And then I went cross country skiing and that was even better, at Trap Family Lodge, which is not, not, not one of our sponsors.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Not yet. One day maybe. Hopefully.
Paul Goldberg: Well, I could stop by with a prospectus.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Sounds good.
Paul Goldberg: With our literature.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yes, yes, yes. Okay, so I will take us through last week’s headlines. Our cover story last week was an episode of The Cancer Letter Podcast, actually. It was a special segment of The Directors with Gary Schwartz and Ramon Parsons. Paul wrote a brilliant, lovely headline for that story. Gary Schwartz and Ramon Parsons on the best of times for science and the worst of times for funding. I just wanted to put that in there because that was cute.
Paul Goldberg: Well, thank you. Thank you.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Thank you. And then I wrote a story about sort of just the status at the time of the FY26 funding package. That’s still up in the air.
Paul Goldberg: Brilliant story, if I may.
Jacquelyn Cobb: And once again, totally. Well, no, it’s not quite as outdated as last week when we talked about this, but we’re still not sure where exactly it’s going to land. The Senate did pass a five-part funding package that excluded the Department of Homeland Security after backlash following the ICE shooting of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, but Alex Pretti was sort of the catalyst for last week’s stalling of the FY26 package. And the DHS bill, the part of the funding package that is focused just on DHS is getting a two week continuing resolution while they debate it further basically.
So that whole thing is going to the House today. They were out of session last week and Mike Johnson has said that they expect to get out of this hopefully very short government shutdown as a result of them not reaching a conclusion about this by Tuesday, which is tomorrow, February 3rd, as of this recording on Monday. So by the time you hear this Wednesday, we should have an answer, hopefully.
Paul Goldberg: We will be out of date for sure.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yes. We’re a weekly publication, we do our best here. And then switching gears here quite a bit, we had an obituary for Abdallah Abou Zahr. He was an oncologist who our former reporter, Alex Carolyn, did an incredible feature on not just him, but his family. And we can dive into that maybe a little bit more, Paul, but he dramatically outlasted his prognosis, but he died last week. So that was a very sad obituary to have to put together.
And then we had a guest editorial by Les Biller about supportive cancer care and really just advocating for the importance and the potential positive impacts of creating supportive care as part of standard of care.
There’s lots of cancer policy. There’s lots of other stuff, but I think I’ve rambled on enough so we can maybe circle back first to the funding package. Do you want to just touch on that? I think I kind of give the update, but I don’t think we should talk about the directors since listeners can just go listen to the directors itself, just probably click away on The directors on the—
Paul Goldberg: It is just one click away.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yes. But the funding package, maybe we can chat about that for a bit.
Paul Goldberg: Well, it’s all kind of very intermediate. None of it is really final at the moment. Everyone I know is saying that it will clear the House and Senate and end up on the president’s desk and signed into law. That I hear from everyone, but that does not mean that it’s going to happen. So I would argue that we should probably wait before we say this. But the fact is that right now, the worst case scenario for NIH is a year long CR, which is better than a 40% cut.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yep.
Paul Goldberg: There is no 15% cap on the-
Jacquelyn Cobb: Indirect cost.
Paul Goldberg: … Indirect cost. Thank you very much. There’s a lot of wind just went through my ears as I was skiing and it causes things.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. You lost some stuff. You got to pick it up.
Paul Goldberg: Yeah, I lost some stuff. Kind of on the pine trees.
And then of course, on the really bad side there is that there is a multi-year funding which is knocking NCI pay line down to 4% from 7%, which wasn’t much to write home about, but that fortunately is kept at 40% of the grants, 38% of the grants. And the only reason we know anything about the impact on NCI is that Doug Lowy mentioned it at one of the open meetings in his director’s remarks before while he was an acting director or acting acting director as he wasn’t really formally an acting director while he was holding the place together, is the right word. So we don’t know about anything similar to that in other institutes.
And really, I’m not sure I understand why do this. I mean, OMB wanted to do 100% at this rate. So yeah, but there will be a small increase for NCI if this goes through and a small increase for NIH, which is again, better than a cut, but it still stinks.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Absolutely. And it’s worth mentioning that the Mikaela Naylon Give Kids a Chance Act is included in this funding package as well. So again, it has not gone to the president’s desk. We don’t know what’s going to happen for sure. I feel like a broken record at this point, but I feel that I’ve been saying many times that everybody says it’s going to pass, everybody says it’s going to pass, and now we’re in that situation again. So all things being as they are right now, it should pass, but who knows what’s going to happen in the meantime.
And yeah, so I’ve sort of been the reporter that’s been kind of following this and watching this, and as it looks like this is maybe getting closer and closer to the White House, I am starting to see more and more reports about what else is in this package. And I think that’ll be a really exciting sort of direction to cover. Once we finally get an answer about what the government is going to do, if it’s going to be a year long CR, if it’s going to be a brand new funding package that hopefully will get through the House, I think that that is going to be really fun to sort of just plumb the depths of what that means. There’s stuff for multi-cancer detection tests, there’s stuff for PBMs, there’s lots to look at. So I’m excited for this to be settled, I think, so that I can shift to other reporting.
Paul Goldberg: Well, the thing that I’m really interested in all of that is the MCDs piece, because it’s really hard to understand what is in there. Well, it’s a bill that was proposed before it was just wrapped into this omnibus, and basically if you get FDA approval, then you’re cool. It has to be paid for by CMS. The only question I have is that if this becomes a law of the land, I’m not so sure that FDA approval, what it means and how to get one.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Exactly.
Paul Goldberg: And I know that I’m not the only person asking that question, how do you get an FDA approval? And lots of people are. So this is an enormous breach in the system. And God knows where that’s going to lead. And I can’t wait to see your story about it.
Jacquelyn Cobb: In progress, yes. In a week or two. Again, depending on what happens. It’s hard to get excited about something we don’t even know is going to go through. So we’ll see.
Paul Goldberg: Well, smart money is, it will go through. But the beauty about smart money is that sometimes smart money loses, so that’s an opportunity.
Jacquelyn Cobb: No guarantees here.
Paul Goldberg: God Bless America.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Oh my God. I was wondering, I mean we can switch over to talking about the obituary. I don’t know if you had any words you wanted to talk about, Paul.
Paul Goldberg: Oh, God. It’s heartbreaking.
Jacquelyn Cobb: I know. I just wanted to give maybe a little bit of … Read from it a little. Does that make sense to you, Paul?
Paul Goldberg: Yeah. Oh my God. Yes.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. So Abdallah’s wife, Shauna Erickson-Abou Zahr, she is really active on Instagram and has been documenting their cancer journey. She actually had cancer that was their entrance into… well, you can’t even say that actually. Their entrance into oncology is that he’s an oncologist. He was an oncologist, gosh. And then she got breast cancer and then she was pregnant. They had this whole sort of saga of then she was cancer free and then he got diagnosed with cancer. And then it seemed like his was not actually that aggressive, but then it was very… It was this, like I said, this saga. And his prognosis originally was that he wasn’t even going to be able to meet his daughter.
Three months before their planned wedding, Abdallah discovered breast cancer in Shauna. And that was back in 2019, 2020. Then one week after their honeymoon, Abdallah was diagnosed with liposarcoma, and Shauna was in her second trimester of pregnancy when he was diagnosed with a terminal recurrence of that liposarcoma. And that was when he was given a six month prognosis.
And so I think what was really powerful about this, for me, at least the thing that kind of hit me the hardest was that he was diagnosed with this terminal recurrence when Shauna was in the second trimester of her pregnancy. I don’t know. I think Claire wrote this, or maybe it was Shauna’s words, but as his health declined, it became clear that he was holding on to meet his son, Tarek, meaning Bright Star, who was born in October 2025. And I think that that was just what was at least the small silver lining was that he got to meet his son and he was really not expecting to. And I think that that’s the one bright silver lining that I can see at least.
But we were all so devastated to find out this news. We’re texting about it, we’re talking about it in meetings. It really became personal for us. So it was definitely something we wanted to commemorate on both in an obituary and then also on the podcast, of course.
Paul Goldberg: Yeah. It was really fascinating to watch that story resonate among all of us reporters and among his colleagues.
Jacquelyn Cobb: And our readers, yeah. I mean, we don’t often do sort of patient stories. Oftentimes when I tell people that I work as a reporter that covers oncology, people assume that that’s really all I do, is really, really sad stories just constantly. And I have to say, no, that’s pretty rare, but it does happen and it is devastating. I couldn’t do them all day, every day. I would be very sad.
Paul Goldberg: And that shouldn’t lead us to do things differently, but weirdly, when we do those stories, they’re the most read stories of the year or years. There’s one story that just keeps popping up as the most read story.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Is that Beth Warner?
Paul Goldberg: Yeah, years and years. And there’s a few others, but that is one thing they all have in common.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. Well, I mean, they’re resonant, right? Of course. I think it is important that we kind of circle back to that every once in a while, even if that isn’t necessarily our coverage area technically. We’re not necessarily a general publication, but I think we have to keep circling back to that and returning to that because that is the whole point.
Paul Goldberg: It’s for the soul.
Jacquelyn Cobb: For the soul. Exactly. So yeah, sad, a little bit of a downbeat conversation, but again, very important I think to touch on it and honor his life.
Paul Goldberg: Yep. And on and on, we are off into another week of covering the wonderful developments in oncology and I guess it’s a great time to be a journalist, isn’t it?
Jacquelyn Cobb: That’s such a sad version of that, Paul. I guess it’s a great time to be a journalist, isn’t it?
Paul Goldberg: Yeah. Well, yeah.
Jacquelyn Cobb: No, I hear you. We’re on this tone right now and I think that’s appropriate, but it is still a great time to be a journalist because we get to write about this and we get to know such incredible people and we get to walk with people through their suffering and through their mourning.
Paul Goldberg: And also through their discoveries and their triumphs.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yes. Yes, of course. So yeah, I don’t know if you had anything else you wanted to touch on with the issue, Paul. The directors definitely took up most of, I think, our bandwidth as a team. When that happens, that happens. But if there’s anything else you wanted to touch on?
Paul Goldberg: Yeah, The Directors is very interesting. It’s very well listened to. It’s getting a lot of attention every time. But what’s really interesting is that there’s always one question that I ask two directors, which is what’s keeping you up at nights now? In this case, it was January 2026, and we do this every month and every month there’s kind of a surprise. And just I think it’s really important for this field to hear from its leaders just because leadership matters, as Joe Simone said.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yes. Yeah, 100%. And I think it’s a good way for us to keep our pulse on things and just how it’s actually impacting our readers. We’ve known about the fourth percentile pay line or equivalency of that basically since what, the summer? But it’s, I think, really important to see how is this actually impacting cancer center directors and cancer centers. I love the directors. My biased opinion is that I love it.
Paul Goldberg: Yeah. It’s really fun because it’s like an evening with people who are fun to talk to. That’s what it feels like. Minus alcohol.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Maybe that should be addition.
Paul Goldberg: Because it’s usually taped early in the day.
Jacquelyn Cobb: You should make it like a requirement that we have to tape it post 7:00 PM.
Paul Goldberg: Post first drink.
Jacquelyn Cobb: And then you have a whiskey or a wine, like a very classy drink. You have to. You can’t have, no Zinfandel, no silly wines. You have to have nice stuff, and then you talk about cancer centers.
Paul Goldberg: That happens a lot, as you know.
Jacquelyn Cobb: I might be drinking silly wine though, to be fair.
Paul Goldberg: Yeah, whatever. It’s all good. Well, thanks a lot. Yeah. Well, that’s fantastic. Thank you.
Jacquelyn Cobb: See you next week?
Paul Goldberg: See you next week. We’ll all be here.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Thank you for joining us on The Cancer Letter Podcast, where we explore the stories shaping the future of oncology. For more in depth reporting and analysis, visit us at cancerletter.com. With over 200 site license subscriptions, you may already have access through your workplace. If you found this episode valuable, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and share. Together, we’ll keep the conversation going.
Paul Goldberg: Until next time, stay informed, stay engaged, and thank you for listening.
