Paul Goldberg is the editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter. He joined the publication in 1986.
His coverage has had a profound impact on the field of oncology, leading to numerous Congressional investigations, and helped change policy, regulation, and standards of care.
Paul’s reporting has been recognized by the Washington DC Professional Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, the Gerald Loeb Awards, the Association of Health Care Journalists, and the Newsletter and Electronic Publishers Foundation.
His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Washington Monthly, and he has been featured on 60 Minutes, 20/20, CNN and NPR. He is also a novelist and author of nonfiction books.
His author website is www.paulgoldberg.com.
Paul graduated from Duke University with a B.A. in economics in 1981.
His coverage has had a profound impact on the field of oncology, leading to numerous Congressional investigations, and helped change policy, regulation, and standards of care.
Paul’s reporting has been recognized by the Washington DC Professional Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, the Gerald Loeb Awards, the Association of Health Care Journalists, and the Newsletter and Electronic Publishers Foundation.
His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Washington Monthly, and he has been featured on 60 Minutes, 20/20, CNN and NPR. He is also a novelist and author of nonfiction books.
His author website is www.paulgoldberg.com.
Paul graduated from Duke University with a B.A. in economics in 1981.
Books
The Château
(Picador, Macmillan Publishers, 2018)
The Yid
(Picador, Macmillan Publishers, 2016)
How We Do Harm: A Doctor Break Ranks About Being Sick in America
with Otis W. Brawley, (St. Martin’s Press, 2012)
The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era
(Little, Brown, 1990; and in paperback, University of Pittsburgh Press) with Ludmilla Alexeyeva
To Live Like Everyone
translation of a memoir of Anatoly Marchenko (Henry Holt, 1989)
The Final Act
(William Morrow, 1988)
Latest Stories
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
On Dec. 3, the faculty and staff members at the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute received an email from Brian J. Druker, the institution’s star scientist, former director, and current CEO, informing them that he would be stepping down from his executive role.
Capitol Hill
The Biden administration has left NIH in a weakened state, intensifying politicization of science on Capitol Hill and eroding the bipartisan support the government’s premier biomedical research agency has traditionally enjoyed.
White House
President-elect Donald Trump said he would nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the post of secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, placing the vaccine skeptic in charge of a vast empire of research, engineering, regulatory, and health care agencies.
Editorial
On Nov. 5, as the American people expressed their will, electing Donald Trump to a second term, I started to wonder what my friends in oncology were thinking.
As the Trump administration stands poised to redraft the nation’s public health priorities, the American Cancer Society, one of the most prominent advocates for cancer patients, finds itself in an interregnum, following an abrupt departure of its Chief Executive Officer Karen E. Knudsen.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
A curious piece of paper hangs in a frame outside the director’s office at University of Iowa Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center on the second floor of the General Hospital.
Wayne A. I. Frederick, a surgical oncologist and former president of Howard University, will step in as interim chief executive officer of the American Cancer Society, effective Nov. 2.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
On Nov. 24, 2003, an article in The Boston Globe told the story of a patient’s remarkable response to gefitinib, a drug that had recently been approved by FDA.
By Paul Goldberg and McKenzie Prillaman
Regulatory News
A group of melanoma experts, joined by three advocacy groups focused on melanoma, has engaged FDA in a public discussion of the challenges of developing new drugs in the refractory setting and the role crossover can play in such trials.
Free
City of Hope has received a $150 million gift from entrepreneurs and philanthropists A. Emmet Stephenson Jr. and his daughter Tessa Stephenson Brand to create a program focused on pancreatic cancer research.
The American Cancer Society said that Karen E. Knudsen “announced her desire to transition” from her role as CEO of the 111-year-old charity in order to pursue “the next phase of her strategy to accelerate progress against cancer.”
Obituary
Richard A. Rettig, the author of an authoritative history of the writing of the National Cancer Act of 1971, died on Aug. 7.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
In 1996, Lei Zheng, a graduate of Peking Union Medical College, enrolled in the doctorate program at what was then known as the Cancer Therapy & Research Center in San Antonio.
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.
Free
When air sirens sound over Kyiv, Ukraine, patients undergoing bone marrow transplants at Ohmatdyt National Children’s Hospital don’t have the option of going to the bomb shelter.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Robert L. Ferris, a head-and-neck surgeon and an expert in cancer immunotherapy was named the executive director of UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and the chief of oncology services at UNC Health.
Free
On Sept. 24, 2002, when I showed up at a meeting of the FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee, I had a pretty good idea that the drug on the agenda—AstraZeneca’s Iressa (gefitinib)—was having a surprising effect on some patients in third-line non-small cell lung cancer.
Free
The American Cancer Society and the American Society of Clinical Oncology have combined their cancer information resources, which will be available at no cost to the public on cancer.org. The collaboration, which combines the two organizations’ sites—ACS’s cancer.org and ASCO’s cancer.net—was announced at the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting in Chicago May 1. Cancer.org is now...
Obituary
Richard M. Simon, NCI biostatistician who likely set a record for the number of first-authored papers, and whose interests included country music, horseback riding and ballroom dancing, died May 9, at age 80. Simon joined NCI in 1974.
Capitol Hill
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-IL) has asked Amgen to provide copies of the company’s communications with FDA related to the dosage of Lumakras (sotorasib), a KRAS inhibitor marketed under an accelerated approval for non-small cell lung cancer.
Free
Over the past three years, the American Cancer Society has recovered from the fundraising decline brought on by COVID-19 and has reversed the years-long fundraising slump in public support.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson Health can add the word “Comprehensive” to its name, becoming the 57th institution to earn this top-level designation from NCI.
As we were finishing last week’s issue of The Cancer Letter, I had a lingering fear that my story about cancer centers bifurcating the job of the cancer center director would miss an institution or two.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
A previous version of this story stated incorrectly that seven institutions split the role of director in two. The original list omitted Fox Chase Cancer Center. Read more.Slowly, over the past two decades, at least eight major cancer centers have changed their organizational structures, splitting the job of the cancer center director into two boxes on the org chart: (1) the chief executive, and (2) the scientist in charge of the NCI Cancer Center Support Grant.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Next week, NCI will announce its plans for surviving on an austere budget given to it by Congress as fiscal year 2024 approaches the six-month mark.
Regulatory News
FDA issued Complete Response Letters for the Biologics License Application for odronextamab in relapsed/refractory follicular lymphoma and in R/R diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, each after two or more lines of systemic therapy.
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.
Free
Soon after he was diagnosed with a dedifferentiated liposarcoma, C. Norman Coleman reached out to The Cancer Letter and the Cancer History Project to initiate a series of interviews about his life and career.
By Otis W. Brawley, Alexandria Carolan and Paul Goldberg
Regulatory News
When conducting a randomized clinical trial of a treatment regimen based on an immune checkpoint inhibitor, trial sponsors should include overall survival as an endpoint, FDA officials say.
By Matthew Bin Han Ong and Paul Goldberg
Regulatory News
The FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee voted 12:2 to recommend approval of the drug imetelstat for a myelodysplastic syndrome indication.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Sometimes in oncology, you get “beat-the-reaper” stories.
Obituary
In September, Norm Coleman received great news: he qualified for the Ironman 70.3 World Championship in New Zealand.
Free
As a new deputy director at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, Monica Baskin has assumed a level of responsibility that is unusual, if not unprecedented, for a population scientist at an NCI-designated cancer center.
By Robert A. Winn, Paul Goldberg and Alexandria Carolan
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
A month after reporting to work in the top job at the University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center, Taofeek K. Owonikoko reflected on the obligations that come with being a Black director of an NCI-designated cancer center.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
As artificial intelligence becomes an indispensable tool in cancer research, drug sponsors and researchers should focus on building and utilizing rich real-world evidence databases that can be used to complement clinical trials.
By Paul Goldberg and Matthew Bin Han Ong
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
When Naoto T. Ueno left MD Anderson to become director of the University of Hawaiʻi Cancer Center, he took one of the most challenging jobs in oncology.
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.
Free
ConcertAI, a company focused on real-world evidence and generative AI, has acquired CancerLinQ, a real-world data and quality of care technology service that was launched by the American Society of Clinical Oncology a decade ago.
Free
The decision by the American Society of Clinical Oncology to venture into the business of Big Data was inspired by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a law focused on “putting America back to work,” Clifford A. Hudis, ASCO’s CEO said to The Cancer Letter.
At a time when distinguished careers can falter because of a careless Facebook post, the oncologist-iconoclast Vinay Prasad is showing no sign of moderating the shaming and haranguing that make him a social media phenom.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Vinay Prasad, a social media phenom and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, recently stunned his colleagues by stating that doctors at Vanderbilt University acted in a “despicable” manner when they offered a double lung transplant to a lung cancer patient. “The doctors at Vanderbilt are despicable in my...
White House
President Joe Biden on Nov. 17 announced his intent to appoint W. Kimryn Rathmell as NCI director.
Clinical
Experts in pharmacology and lung cancer urged physicians to prescribe the Amgen agent Lumakras (sotorasib) at the lowest tested dose—240 mg—instead of the four times higher dose of 960 mg recommended by the sponsor.
Free
John Carpten, when he was named director of the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center in April, took over a massive, newly formed national oncology network—the first of its kind.
Benjamin G. Neel, a widely respected cancer biologist with a considerable social media presence, was suspended from his job as director of the New York University Perlmutter Cancer Center following complaints over his retweets of political cartoons and other materials that were critical of protesters against Israel’s strikes on Gaza and that included caricatures critics described as “anti-Arab.”
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
The University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center received NCI’s Comprehensive designation just 10 whip-fast years after the center received its initial Cancer Center designation.
NCI Director's Report
Amid the gridlock that has seized Washington, NCI faces a grim and disturbing FY2024, the institute’s Principal Deputy Director Douglas R. Lowy said at the annual meeting of the Association of American Cancer Institutes.
By Alexandria Carolan and Paul Goldberg
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.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
The American Association for Cancer Research has established the AACR Cancer Centers Alliance to foster collaboration between cancer centers.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Montefiore Einstein Cancer Center can now add the word “Comprehensive” to its logo.
Free
Shelton “Shelley” Earp said he will step down as director of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center effective June 2024.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Crystal S. Denlinger was named CEO of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network.
Free
When John Laszlo joined the Acute Leukemia Service at NCI in 1956, the field of oncology was nascent—and the cure for childhood leukemia seemed beyond reach.
By Alexandria Carolan and Paul Goldberg
Free
Fifteen years ago, after the death of his favorite uncle, Steven Rosen committed his grief to paper.
Capitol Hill
The fiscal year 2024 Labor, HHS, Education, and Related Agencies spending bill heading for approval by the House Appropriations Committee cuts NIH by $2.8 billion and NCI by $216 million.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
On June 29, the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling that reverses 45 years of legal precedent in admissions at institutions of higher learning, striking a death blow to affirmative action.
By Paul Goldberg and Matthew Bin Han Ong
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
The Sunderland Foundation has given The University of Kansas Cancer Center a $100 million gift to construct a cancer center building.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
The University of Florida Health Cancer Center has received NCI Cancer Center designation.
Clinical
A survey conducted by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network found that 93% of its 27 member institutions are experiencing shortages of carboplatin, and 70% lack cisplatin.
Editorial
The facts of my story about UCSD Moores Cancer Center in last week’s issue of The Cancer Letter (June 2, 2023) don’t seem to be in dispute.
The Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health is in imminent danger of losing its Comprehensive designation, and members of the center’s External Advisory Board are urging the leadership of the parent institution to act fast.
Free
VCU Massey Cancer Center can now add the word “Comprehensive” to its name.
Free
Today’s critical shortage of cisplatin and carboplatin occurred because manufacturers failed to invest in enhancing production capacity, Richard Pazdur, director of the FDA Oncology Center of Excellence and acting director of the Office of Oncologic Diseases, said to The Cancer Letter.
Clinical
Proven curative regimens containing platinum-based drugs—cisplatin and carboplatin—have become largely unavailable because of a nationwide drug shortage. The institutions that have some supplies of cisplatin and carboplatin are setting up algorithms for rationing their dwindling stocks, which usually means giving top priority to patients treated with curative intent and denying standard-of-care treatment to patients who cannot be cured but who can still benefit from these drugs.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
The shortage of platinum-based drugs in the United States is an endemic problem—i.e., Europe is unaffected—caused by the absence of transparency, dearth of early warnings, and a lack of redundancy in the supply chain.
White House
President Biden announced his intent to nominate Monica Bertagnolli to the post of NIH director.
Regulatory News
The FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee agreed with the agency’s forcefully stated view that Lynparza (olaparib), a PARP inhibitor, should be given only to metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer patients whose tumors have a BRCA mutation.
Cancer prevention and control and efforts to ensure health equity are essential in meeting the Cancer Moonshot goal of halving cancer mortality in the next 25 years, but some complex scientific and societal problems must be resolved for this to happen, a group of four directors of NCI-designated cancer centers said.
White House
If you saw Monica Bertagnolli dash around at the Orlando convention center at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research earlier this week, you would not have guessed that these may be her final days in the NCI director’s job.
Free
This point is easily overlooked: Monica Bertagnolli has two jobs, not one. She is the director of the National Cancer Institute and head of the National Cancer Program.
By Paul Goldberg and Matthew Bin Han Ong
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
For Gary Schwartz, leaving New York was the only difficult part of taking the top job at Case Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Free
Jed Manocherian wants your attention—but not for himself.
Free
Soon after real estate developer and investor Jed Manocherian started a non-profit that lobbies for biomedical research, he heard about the outsized role Mary Lasker played in shaping government-funded biomedical research in the U.S.
Free
Mary Lasker left a collection of detailed oral histories and a massive archive of documents, kept at Columbia University: 795 boxes and 7 flat boxes, which amount to 353 linear feet.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
No Hispanic woman has ever served as director of an NCI-designated cancer center. This changed a month ago, on Feb. 6, when Yolanda Sanchez became director and CEO of The University of New Mexico Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Regulatory News
Can a single drug replace a long-established curative, albeit brutal, regimen of chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery?
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Some job relocations are less cumbersome than others. When Jedd Wolchok left Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center after more than a quarter century, he crossed East 68th Street to Weill Cornell campus, where he is now the director of the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Ruben A. Mesa is going into the new year with a massive new challenge: bring together the programs and cultures of an academic cancer center and a hybrid cancer center—and convincing NCI that the new organization should keep its elite designation.
Free
Monica Bertagnolli, the 16th director of the National Cancer Institute, announced that she will be undergoing treatment for early-stage breast cancer.
By Paul Goldberg and Matthew Bin Han Ong
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
“There’s nothing like a deadline to make sure you get done what you need to get done.” Joseph A. Califano III, a head and neck surgeon scientist, was named director of Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health, an NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center that serves San Diego County.
Clinical
The NCI Clinical Trials and Translational Research Advisory Committee has approved an interim set of guidelines for streamlining requirements for conduct of clinical trials.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
NCI will immediately start the process of streamlining IND-exempt trials in order to make them faster, simpler, more flexible, less expensive, and easier to integrate with clinical practice, James Doroshow, NCI deputy director for clinical and translational research and director of the Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis, said to The Cancer Letter. On Nov....
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Pavan Reddy’s motivations to apply for the director’s job at Baylor College of Medicine’s Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center included his own research interests.
Regulatory News
FDA has been mulling over reliance on real-world evidence for about a decade, keeping it on the edges of the existing approval system that runs on data from conventional clinical trials.
NCI Director's Report
In her first public speech as NCI director, Monica Bertagnolli said that under her stewardship NCI would modernize clinical trials and double patient accrual.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Researchers at the Gene Editing Institute at ChristianaCare have been moving forward with an effort to use CRISPR-directed gene editing technology in the clinic.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
The Bezos family has committed $710.5 million to Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center over the next 10 years—likely the largest single private contribution made to a cancer center in the U.S.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Patient navigation didn’t start out as a business idea. The concept—and the adaptation of the nautical term—are attributed to the surgeon Harold Freeman, when he started to practice in Harlem after finishing his residency at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 1968. “If people meet barriers in getting through the healthcare system with cancer and...
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
As Ben Ho Park sees it, the mission of a cancer researcher doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. It follows that Park’s new role as director of Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center is inseparable from his role as an executive of the Global Cancer Institute, a nonprofit that works with healthcare providers in low- and middle-income countries to improve survival rates for underserved cancer patients.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Andrew Chapman is the first geriatric oncology expert to run an NCI-designated cancer center. Ever.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Companies vying for accelerated approval and devising strategies for confirmatory trials would be best served by seeking prospective sign-off from FDA, agency officials say. Officials from the FDA Oncology Center of Excellence described these best practices in a perspective piece in the Sept. 21 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine and discussed the...
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.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Augusto C. Ochoa’s introduction to NCI community research had the feel of a battlefield commission. In the aftermath of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, the PI of what was then the Community Clinical Oncology Program informed Ochoa, that she would be leaving Louisiana State University.
European regulators have prohibited the already-implemented $7.1 billion merger of Illumina and GRAIL, stating that the deal “would have stifled innovation, and reduced choice in the emerging market for blood-based early cancer detection tests.”
Free
The roof of the Radiation Therapy Department of the Mariupol Municipal Interdistrict Regional Oncologic Dispensary, the parts that aren’t caved in, looks like a sieve.
