Jacquelyn Cobb is an associate editor and reporter with The Cancer Letter. She joined the publication in 2022.
Before joining The Cancer Letter, Jacquelyn worked at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute as a research data specialist in translational gastrointestinal oncology. She graduated with an M.Sc. in precision medicine and biomedical technology as an Erasmus Mundus Scholar in July, 2022.
Jacquelyn graduated from Lafayette College in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in biology and English. During college, she was editor-in-chief of the undergraduate-led research journal,The Journal of Young Investigators. After college, she received a Fulbright Fellowship and spent nine months in Kolkata, India as an English teaching assistant.
Before joining The Cancer Letter, Jacquelyn worked at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute as a research data specialist in translational gastrointestinal oncology. She graduated with an M.Sc. in precision medicine and biomedical technology as an Erasmus Mundus Scholar in July, 2022.
Jacquelyn graduated from Lafayette College in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in biology and English. During college, she was editor-in-chief of the undergraduate-led research journal,The Journal of Young Investigators. After college, she received a Fulbright Fellowship and spent nine months in Kolkata, India as an English teaching assistant.
Latest Stories
Tumors are able to form without any DNA mutations, according to a recent proof-of-principle study performed in flies. Epigenetic changes alone—even temporary alterations—induced permanent cancer cell fate.
NCI Director's Report
NCI Director Kimryn Rathmell has released her professional judgment budget proposal, requesting nearly $11.5 billion—the same amount as last year’s proposal prepared by her predecessor, Monica Bertagnolli.
Free
Elizabeth Comen originally set out to write a book about the wellness industry, but ended up writing a different book altogether.
Health Equity
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.
Regulatory News
The FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee July 25 voted unanimously to set more rigorous standards for new trials for approval of perioperative indications of cancer drugs.
More than a year after a catastrophic shortage of platinum-based chemotherapy drugs swept through the U.S., FDA on June 28 officially removed carboplatin and cisplatin from the drug shortage list.
Health Equity
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it intends to start providing additional reimbursement for some high-cost drugs for people with Medicare who receive care at Indian Health Service or tribal hospitals, beginning Jan. 1, 2025.
Obituary
Edward Sondik, an electrical engineer by training, followed a career path that led him to top public health positions.He was a director of the National Center for Health Statistics at CDC, an acting director of NCI, and a deputy director of the NCI Division of Cancer Prevention and Control.
Clinical
Treatment with an indefinite course of osimertinib dramatically improves progression-free survival for patients with stage 3 non-small cell cancer, according to the results of the LAURA trial. The median PFS was 39.1 months in the osimertinib group, compared to 5.6 months with the placebo group.
Women make up more than half of the U.S. population and are well represented in medicine—but not so much in the top jobs in oncology.
Cancer center communicators—public relations, marketing, and communications experts—are indispensable players in the implementation of the National Cancer Plan, said Peter Garrett, director of NCI’s Office of Communications and Public Liaison.
Clinical
Homologous recombination deficiency tests are used routinely in the clinic to determine which patients get PARP inhibitors.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Homologous recombination deficiency tests are available from multiple vendors, and every day they are used to determine whether patients stand to benefit from PARP inhibitors.Â
Free
Lillian L. Siu discovered her passion while perusing employment ads in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
Regulatory News
In a unanimous vote, the FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee advised the agency to accept the metric of “minimal residual disease,” or MRD, as a basis for accelerated approvals of therapies in all settings of multiple myeloma.Â
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Sylvester’s C. Ola Landgren: “I was convinced that this is really the way to go”
Clinical
An analysis by researchers from the International Agency for Research on Cancer casts doubt on validity of an endpoint used in key studies of multi-cancer detection tests.
White House
A coalition of health and physician groups earlier this week filed a lawsuit seeking to force FDA to finalize a long-delayed final rule banning menthol cigarettes.
After a year of trying to sell his mansion, former Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder opted to donate it to the American Cancer Society.
Regulatory News
The FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee voted overwhelmingly in favor of expanding the indications of two chimeric antigen receptor engineered T-cell therapies for multiple myeloma that showed improvement in progression-free survival, but also reported a higher number of early deaths on the experimental arm.Â
Regulatory News
The FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee voted 12:2 to recommend approval of the drug imetelstat for a myelodysplastic syndrome indication.
NCI and Cancer Research UK awarded $125 million in total funding through the Cancer Grand Challenges program, supporting research on cancer inequities, early-onset cancers, solid tumors in children, and T-cell receptors. The $125 million investment marks the Cancer Grand Challenges program’s largest funding round to date.
Health Equity
A study of over 100,000 United States veterans has found that housing for veterans with lung and colorectal cancer was associated with a survival benefit.Â
More than a decade ago, Glenn Begley and Lee Ellis published a paper with astounding findings: of 53 “landmark” studies, only six, or 11%, were reproducible, even with the same reagents and the same protocols—and even, sometimes, in the same laboratory—as the original study.
Seventeen scientists have received NCI’s 2023 Outstanding Investigator Awards, with up to $600,000 in direct costs per year over six years.
Over 50 research papers that list top leaders of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute among authors are implicated in an investigation of allegations of data manipulation.Â
Despite the continuing overall decline in cancer death rates—driven by reduction in tobacco use, improvements in early detection, and advances in treatment—the projected number of new diagnoses now tops 2 million for the first time, according to the American Cancer Society’s 2024 Cancer Statistics report.
Regulatory News
Multi-cancer detection tests evoke conflicting reactions—the excitement at their promise is quickly dampened by concerns over the uncertainty of their clinical benefit, very low sensitivity for detecting stage 1 cancers, and the risks that come from subsequent workups.
Free
Medicare has started to pay for navigation for guiding patients through the maze of health care services in settings where treatment involves multiple specialties.
News Analysis
It’s a divorce everyone has an opinion on.
Regulatory News
The FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee earlier this week was asked to review two of the slowest-moving confirmatory trials.
Clinical
Imatinib—the pathbreaking cancer drug that gave Philadelphia chromosome-positive chronic myeloid leukemia patients near-normal life expectancies—now stands poised to save even more lives.Â
Regulatory News
The FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee concurred with the FDA staff that the Amgen Inc. confirmatory trial of the lung cancer therapy sotorasib (Lumakras) was uninterpretable as a result of a perceived loss of equipoise.
Regulatory News
The FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee Oct. 4 voted decisively to recommend the first-ever approval supported by a clinical trial that relied on an external control arm—using patient-level data extracted from another trial.
Clinical
If you’ve been following the saga of drug shortages in this publication, you know how America’s cancer institutions are scrambling to obtain platinum-based drugs for their patients.
Health Equity
The cancer clinic at Tuba City, AZ, was a landmark from the day it opened its doors. It is, in fact, the only such clinic on any Indian reservation in the lower 48 states.
Clinical
In 1996, Carolyn Bertozzi and her lab at UC Berkeley were working to develop a way to image cell-surface glycans: sugar-based macromolecules that coat the surface of cells.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
A mainstay of cancer treatment, doxorubicin is used as a standalone agent or in combination therapies, on-label and off, in at least 14 cancer types, including breast cancer, non-small cell lung cancer, and Wilms tumor.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Scientists used to dismiss the notion that the Y chromosome plays a role in cancer.
Clinical
Setting cancer drug dosage used to be easy: find the delicate balance between killing the disease and subjecting the patient to intolerable harm, and you are done.
You may want to know that (a) the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health has decided on its first project and (b) it’s known under a neato acronym: NITRO.
Clinical
For over 30 years, radiation therapy has been a part of the standard of care for locally advanced rectal cancer patients.
Clinical
NCI and all five cooperative groups that make up the National Clinical Trials Network have launched a large-scale precision medicine initiative that will match cancer patients with early-phase clinical trials testing novel drug combinations that target specific tumor alterations.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Leukemia was mostly a fatal disease when Hagop Kantarjian, a medical student at the American University of Lebanon in Beirut, first came to MD Anderson in 1978.
Wayne State University will display artwork from a project that matched Wayne State University artists and people touched by cancer to create works of art that reflect the cancer experience. The exhibit, stemming from the program called Brushes With Cancer, will be open between May 18 and June 15 at Wayne State’s Art Department Gallery...
Capitol Hill
President Joe Biden’s 2024 budget proposal and the Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023 that was passed by the House last month will have a chilling effect on biomedical research, members of the Senate Appropriations Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Subcommittee said at a hearing May 4.
The National Academy of Sciences announced the election of 120 members and 26 international members in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.
White House
Cancer death rates will need to drop faster—by an average of 2.7% per year versus the current rate of 2.3% per year—to achieve the Cancer Moonshot goal of a 50% reduction by 2047.
Clinical
Pragmatica-Lung, the first study born from a broader effort by NCI, FDA, industry, academia, and advocacy groups to modernize the clinical trial process, has begun enrolling patients.
How do you treat cancer without cisplatin? Oncologists and pharmacists around the country are grappling with this question amidst a severe cisplatin shortage, first reported Feb. 6.
Regulatory News
FDA last week issued a draft guidance that urges sponsors to conduct randomized controlled trials when they seek accelerated approval.
Regulatory News
The FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee March 9 voted 11:2 in favor the approval of Polivy (polatuzumab vedotin-piiq) in combination with a rituximab product, cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, and prednisone for treatment-naive diffuse large B-cell lymphoma.
It appears that researchers needn’t venture far from home in search of animals that experience cancer much like we humans do.
Clinical
Cancer patients face a sharply higher risk of suicide than the general population, but the strongest risk factors may be mitigated through increased screening for depression, expanded use of psychosocial and palliative care, and improved access to adequate health insurance, according to a recent study led by American Cancer Society researchers.
Colorectal cancer risk is rapidly shifting to younger populations and to more advanced stages at diagnosis, according to a report published by the American Cancer Society.
Earthquake damage in Aleppo, Syria, Feb. 14, 2023. Credit: Shutterstock/Mohammad BashThe Feb. 6 earthquake that devastated southern Turkey and northern Syria has exacerbated Syria’s already-severe healthcare crisis.
Regulatory News
Can a single drug replace a long-established curative, albeit brutal, regimen of chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery?
For a decade, thousands of PhDs in epigenetics may have been relying on the wrong tool as they study the biological processes that regulate how and when genes are expressed or silenced.
By Jacquelyn Cobb and Matthew Bin Han Ong
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
It took a team of researchers more than 18 months to get their paper on epigenetic variation published—likely because they are saying that epigeneticists have been fishing in the wrong pond for a decade.
By Jacquelyn Cobb and Matthew Bin Han Ong
The NCI Board of Scientific Advisors unanimously approved six new concepts and two reissue concepts at a joint meeting of the BSA and the National Cancer Advisory Board.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
FDA’s Singh and Rivera describe the “new normal”—and the future—in cancer pragmatic trials
The past six weeks have brought fundamental change in the way oncology drugs are being developed. At this unprecedented moment in oncopolitics, FDA, NCI, academic oncologists, advocates, and the industry are in agreement on how cancer therapies should be developed, tested and approved.
By Jacquelyn Cobb, Matthew Bin Han Ong and Paul Goldberg
Clinical
Pragmatica-Lung is shaping up as the clinical trial to watch—not just because of the research question, but because of the way it’s being addressed.
By Jacquelyn Cobb, Matthew Bin Han Ong and Paul Goldberg
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Pragmatica-Lung is the first of what is likely to be a series of simpler trials with relaxed enrollment criteria and streamlined data collection requirements.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Catherine Bollard and her team have an ambitious goal:Â To establish CAR T-cell therapies as the standard of care for pediatric solid tumors within the next 10 years. CAR Ts have made little to no clinical traction in solid tumors thus far, despite their success in some blood cancers.
Free
Bianca Ilich will always remember Dec. 12, 2018. In the morning, she went to ASPCA, brought home a tabby cat with moon-sized green eyes, and named him Misho. Ilich had grown up with pets in Sofia, Bulgaria. As a lone transplant to the U.S., she thought of Misho as more than an ordinary felis catus—Misho was family.
Cancer death rates continued to decline among men, women, children, and adolescents and young adults in every major racial and ethnic group in the U.S. from 2015 to 2019, according to the latest Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer.
Free
Kristina Mirabeau-Beale was sure that she and her family were well prepared for Hurricane Ian.
The FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee voted down three problematic indications of cancer drugs, two of which got on the market under the agency’s accelerated approval program.
Discovery of new cancer treatments and detection tools makes it all the more urgent to address health disparities, the American Association for Cancer Research 2022 Cancer Progress Report said.
Capitol Hill
The 2024 Bypass Budget submitted by NCI Acting Director Douglas Lowy asks for $9.988 billion—$2.222 billion more than the 2023 document submitted by then director Ned Sharpless.
Don’t sack the director because your cancer center’s score and ranking by U.S. News & World Report have slipped.
By Jacquelyn Cobb, Matthew Bin Han Ong and Paul Goldberg
