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
Regulatory News
As he addressed FDA employees, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. described the Trump era as a “generational opportunity to make the regulatory agency live up to its foundational ideals” and emerge from the morass of what he described as the “deep state.”
Clinical
Immunotherapy has changed the course of blood cancers and melanomas, but is stubbornly ineffective for the treatment of most epithelial solid cancers—the cancers that kill about 90% of the more than 600,000 Americans who die of cancer each year.
The day before health economist Jay Bhattacharya stepped into his new role as NIH director, he sent a document to his employees outlining his top five priorities for the department, which included “reproducibility” and “transparency,” two themes he discussed at his confirmation hearings (The Cancer Letter, March 7, 2025).
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Brian J. Druker summits Mt. Hood in 1996The last time Brian J. Druker ran a marathon, his daughter, Julia, was six months old.
In the Archives
Credit: NCI/Linda BartlettIn an oral history conducted by FDA in September 2013, Andrew C. von Eschenbach recounted his eight-month stint in a dual role as both FDA acting commissioner and NCI director.
Capitol Hill
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that it is making sweeping revisions by cutting personnel, centralizing functions, and consolidating divisions.
News Analysis
The March 15 continuing resolution has gutted the Department of Defense Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program. The program’s funding was cut by 57%, compared to Fiscal Year 2024 levels—from $1.5 billion to $650 million.
News Analysis
For over a month since President Trump announced his intent to impose aggressive new tariffs on America’s friends and foes alike, lobbyists for hospitals, medical societies, and makers of branded and generic drugs have been trying to convince him to rethink.
Regulatory News
Government work isn’t what it used to be.
Capitol Hill
Amid the flood zone of today’s Washington, the confirmation hearing for Jayanta (Jay) Bhattacharya’s nomination as director of NIH was remarkably calm.
Regulatory News
In a speech before a joint session of Congress, President Trump briefly addressed pediatric cancer, pointing to a 13-year old brain tumor survivor, Devarjaye “DJ” Daniel, who was watching from the gallery, making his dream come true by naming him a Secret Service agent.
Capitol Hill
The House Republicans have narrowly pushed through a FY25 budget resolution, setting off a tangle of life-and-death sequelae for access to health insurance through Medicaid and Obamacare, and through a second-order effect, biomedical research.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Shearwood McClelland III’s grandfather was a ditchdigger who dreamed that his six Black daughters would become doctors. McClelland’s mother did not disappoint—she became the first Black woman board-certified in maternal fetal medicine in the history of the United States. Now, McClelland is the chief medical officer of Cancer Health Equity at the University of Oklahoma...
In the Archives
In 1984, Peter Greenwald brought a concern about food labeling to FDA. He felt that the “standards of identity”—the standards a food product must meet in order to be marketed under a certain name—went against the best available public health evidence.
White House
As NCI employees and others at HHS were receiving notices of termination, national cancer organizations called on Congress “to restore stability to NIH.”
Free
Nearly 30 years ago, while completing an assignment for his master’s degree in public health, Brian Rivers discovered he had a family history of prostate cancer.
White House
Earlier this week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services amid many resignations at federal health agencies and cancellations of NIH and NCAB meetings. All of this happened at a time when the Trump administration is reportedly preparing to fire thousands of HHS workers.
White House
The web page for the FDA Office of Minority Health and Health Equity is no more. The pages for the NCI Diversity Training and Biomedical Workforce Development Branch and Disparities Research Branch are kaput as well.
Over the last 45 years, prevention and screening interventions have made a greater contribution to averting cancer deaths than have improvements in treatment, according to a modeling study led by researchers at NCI.
By Yiqing Wang and Jacquelyn Cobb
Clinical
The National Comprehensive Cancer Network published its first patient resource aimed at informing people about the latest recommendations around hereditary and familial cancer risk. The document provides guidance on testing for inherited genetic mutations that can raise the risk of cancer.
The NCI Human Tumor Atlas Network (HTAN) has published a cluster of papers intended to advance the framework of spatial omics, the science of profiling morphological and molecular features of human cancers in two and three dimensions.
The NCI Board of Scientific Advisors approved four new concepts and five reissue concepts at a joint meeting of the BSA and the National Cancer Advisory Board Dec. 2-3.
NCI Director's Report
NCI is temporarily reducing its paylines as the federal government is being funded at FY2024 levels via a continuing resolution that extends until Dec. 20, delaying the budgeting process for most federal agencies in the new fiscal year.
One year after the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services made the decision to pay for patient navigation services, data from early adopters show that navigation services are leading to better outcomes, significant cost savings for healthcare systems, and mitigation of health inequities.
Clinical
The San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium will focus on doing the same with less—less surgery, less radiation, while maintaining clinical outcomes. The symposium will take place Dec. 10-13 in San Antonio, TX.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
When Judith O. Hopkins started medical school in 1974, she had to sign a contract promising to not get pregnant. This was not the most egregious form of sexism she would face in her career. Seeking a residency in emergency medicine in 1977, she was told point blank that she would not be considered. “I...
The National Academy of Medicine announced the election of 90 regular members and 10 international members during its annual meeting.
Clinical
In an industry that set its sights on reshaping cancer detection, GRAIL Inc. had the appearance of a pioneer.
Clinical
If clinical research were anything like fly fishing, the scientific question that EA3163 trial attempted to answer might be considered “the one that got away”.
Regulatory News
The FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee on Sept. 26 voted that PD-L1 inhibitors should not be indicated as a first-line treatment for patients with PD-L1-negative gastric/gastroesophageal junction adenocarcinoma and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma.
Regulatory News
The FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee on Sept. 26 voted that PD-L1 inhibitors should not be indicated for patients with PD-L1-negative gastric/gastroesophageal junction adenocarcinoma and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma.
A law group associated with conservative causes and funded by leading conservative donors has sued NIH, HHS, and the National Library of Medicine, demanding that the institutions address PubMed’s inability to display all papers authored by researchers who have published under multiple names.
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.
By Jacquelyn Cobb and McKenzie Prillaman
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
HRD results can vary widely, depending on what assay you choose—even as they guide treatment choices
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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: 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.
