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 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
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.
Free
Monica Bertagnolli, the 16th director of the National Cancer Institute, announced that she will be undergoing treatment for early-stage breast cancer.
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.
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.
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.
Don’t sack the director because your cancer center’s score and ranking by U.S. News & World Report have slipped.
White House
Monica M. Bertagnolli, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, stands poised to become the first woman and the first chair of a clinical trials cooperative group to be named director of the National Cancer Institute.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Karen E. Knudsen has spent the past year bringing the American Cancer Society into the 21st century.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Some things are known to grow well in Kansas. Some things aren’t. Over the past 18 years, Roy Jensen has been told time and again that it made no sense to even try to grow an NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center in Kansas. Yet, he did the only thing he could. Persist. Stubbornly. The University of...
NCI is moving forward with a plan to evaluate multi-cancer early detection tests, a technology that is rapidly making inroads into the healthcare system.
By Paul Goldberg and Alice Tracey
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
As she was interviewing for the director’s job at the George Washington Cancer Center, Julie E. Bauman was asked what her biggest fear would be.
NCI has truncated the just-renewed five-year Cancer Center Support Grant held by Wake Forest Baptist Comprehensive Cancer Center as that institution undergoes a bumpy transition of leadership—in the midst of a challenging integration with Atrium Health Levine Cancer Institute.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Fox Chase Cancer Center used to be a place where Nobel laureates toiled. Now, people who love the place—and in oncology, many people do—are hoping that Jonathan Chernoff, Fox Chase’s new director, will restore vitality to the venerable Philadelphia-based cancer center.
Hospitals and radiology clinics are rationing—of all things—intravenous contrast agents used for computed tomography imaging.
Capitol Hill
Before any strategy can be formulated for next year’s appropriations, cancer groups must confront the formidable challenge of figuring out how much of President Joe Biden’s vision for cancer research is realistic.
Regulatory News
FDA has announced proposed product standards that would prohibit menthol as a characterizing flavor in cigarettes and prohibit all characterizing flavors other than tobacco in cigars.
William L. Dahut, the NCI clinical director, was named chief scientific officer of the American Cancer Society.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Why is the April 21 ODAC different from all the other ODACs? At all other ODACs, a commercial sponsor gets to make a case. On April 21, only FDA’s voice will be heard.
Federal prosecutors earlier this week filed a complaint against the Memphis Methodist health system, taking over a qui tam action initially filed by private whistleblowers, who alleged that Methodist’s six-year arrangement with West Clinic, an oncology private practice, violated the Anti-Kickback Statute and the False Claims Act.
Free
After nearly five years in the federal government—at both NCI and FDA—Ned Sharpless is stepping down from his position as NCI director.
Obituary
Last week, I became obsessed with reports that Vladimir Putin is a believer in an unproven remedy that involves bathing in blood drained from the horns of Siberian red deer.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Cancer centers don’t usually ask NCI to increase their catchment areas. That’s because including more people and more square miles means increasing the responsibility to show impact.
White House
In a move that appears to prioritize biomedical engineering over cancer research, President Joe Biden’s proposal for fiscal year 2023 cuts NCI funding by $199 million, a 2.9% percent cut from the current year’s level.
By Alice Tracey and Paul Goldberg
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
James Allison has reshaped cancer drug development, making checkpoint inhibitors a staple of therapy in many key indications—and dramatically improving survival outcomes in previously recalcitrant diseases.
Under ordinary circumstances, business arrangements built around the 340B drug discount program remain shrouded in secrecy.
Free
In 1968, my country went to war. As Soviet tanks rolled toward Prague, newspapers described the invasion of Czechoslovakia as an act of “friendship.”
All 15 members of the External Advisory Board of the Wake Forest Baptist Comprehensive Cancer Center resigned, stating that they are also withdrawing their “endorsement for submission of the competitive renewal of the Cancer Center Support Grant.”
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Raymond N. DuBois has joined The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research as executive chairman of the board.
Regulatory News
In a 14:1 vote, ODAC nixes a PD-1 drug developed in China; data not generalizable to U.S. population
The FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee expressed decisive support for the agency’s view that data from trials of checkpoint inhibitors performed in mainland China aren’t applicable to the U.S. population.
By Paul Goldberg and Alice Tracey
Regulatory News
FDA is preparing to review an estimated 25 applications for cancer drugs that are being developed based largely—and in many cases entirely—on data from mainland China.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
The acquisition of Cancer Treatment Centers of America will allow City of Hope to build a national network of cancer centers that is fundamentally different from those of other cancer centers.
Free
After having treated over 200,000 COVID cases over two years—more than any health system in the U.S.—Northwell Health once again finds itself in the center of the storm as cases of the omicron variant escalate in New York State.
Free
Forty-nine years and a few days after the signing of the National Cancer Act of 1971, we launched the Cancer History Project. One year and 11,894 articles later, we have built a shared, collaborative, and unprecedented resource.
Free
To accurately gauge the impact of the National Cancer Act of 1971 at the half-century point, Abbe R. Gluck and Charles S. Fuchs decided to focus on more than the science of cancer.
God did not intend directors of NCI-designated cancer centers to last in their jobs forever.
Free
Soon after starting work on a book about the role the NCI-designated cancer centers have played in the National Cancer Program, Skip Trump and Eric Rosenthal got in touch with John W. Yarbro.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
The University of Virginia has taken a long, circuitous path to NCI comprehensive cancer center designation, but it got there.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Eric P. Winer will begin his job as director of Yale Cancer Center and physician-in-chief of Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale on Feb. 1, but he has started his “listening tour” early.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
FDA officials said the questions about accelerated approval of PD-1 and PD-L1 drugs have been largely resolved, thanks in part to guidance from the Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee.
Obituary
Joseph R. Bertino, a physician who made fundamental discoveries in cancer biology, defined curative cancer treatment regimens, trained generations of influential cancer researchers, ran productive laboratories, and served as the inaugural director of Yale Cancer Center, died on Oct. 10. He was 91.
Free
An argument can be made that only a government research agency like NCI has the capacity to answer questions about monitoring pancreatic cysts—and how some of them turn malignant.
Free
Prevention and early detection trials have been especially vulnerable to being disrupted by the COVID-19 lockdown, and a comparison of two regimens for monitoring pancreatic cysts—EA2185—was more vulnerable than most.
Free
Prevention and early detection studies frequently require engaging physicians from specialties other than oncologists, said Peter O’Dwyer and Mitchell Schnall, co-chairs of ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Randall F. Holcombe has a goal: earn the NCI designation for University of Vermont Cancer Center. Or, to be precise, earn back the NCI designation.
On Dec. 8, 2020, a month after losing the election, then-president Donald Trump announced his intent to name 26 people to advisory boards across the federal government. Among them were three would-be members of the National Cancer Advisory Board, and in the months following, these three appointments—which have been blocked and ultimately terminated by the...
By Alice Tracey and Paul Goldberg
John A. Ellerton, the principal investigator of the Nevada Cancer Research Foundation NCI Community Oncology Research Program, has won the 2021 Harry Hynes Award. The award is given annually to NCORP PIs for outstanding contribution to clinical trials and community research. In 1983, Ellerton’s group, then called the Southern Nevada Research Foundation, was among the...
Obituary
Franco Muggia, a drug developer and former director of NYU Langone’s Perlmutter Cancer Center, died unexpectedly on Sept. 8.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
NCI has renewed the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center’s comprehensive designation.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
On Aug. 5, two months into her job as CEO of the American Cancer Society, Karen Knudsen was in Burlington, VT, checking out the Hope Lodge—the third one she visited since taking the job.
A Texas law that bans all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy—and a Supreme Court order that allows the state law to take effect—is having an impact on cancer research in the state.
Free
A Congressional letter is asking NIH to describe the procedures employed for rooting out sexual misconduct committed by advisors.
Free
First published in 1977, Cancer Crusade: The Story of the National Cancer Act of 1971, is a dispassionate legislative history—a book you can trust.
Free
Consortium cancer centers have been around for 50 years—since the signing of the National Cancer Act of 1971.
Two decades ago, when Fred Hutch, the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s formed a consortium, they created the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance to serve as a hub of clinical operations.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Twenty years ago, when Fred Hutch, the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s created a united cancer program in Seattle, they relied on an entity called Seattle Cancer Care Alliance to deliver the consortium’s clinical services.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
It’s safe to say that July 1 was a better than average day for Suresh S. Ramalingam.
Free
On a June day in 2002, Roy Jensen, a pathologist at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, was back home in the Kansas City environs, taking his young sons to basketball camp in Lawrence.
Free
The FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee, in an 13-4 vote, recommended against approval of retifanlimab, a PD-1 inhibitor, for the treatment of squamous carcinoma of the anal canal.
Free
The Cancer Letter received eight 2021 Dateline Awards from the Washington, D.C. Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists—five for journalism, and three for illustration.
FDA officials said drug sponsors will soon be required to conduct randomized studies to determine optimal dosages of cancer drugs before proceeding to testing safety and efficacy in pivotal trials.
Free
Inappropriate sexual relationships of the sort Axel Grothey engaged in at Mayo Clinic may be all too common.
Free
The aftermath of sexual misconduct at premier medical institutions rarely leaves visible traces: HR is brought in, confidentiality invoked, deals made. The case of Axel Grothey’s exit from Mayo Clinic is a notable exception.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Cheryl Willman was named executive director of Mayo Clinic Cancer Programs and director of Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center. Her transition to Mayo will occur sometime in August, officials said.
Free
In recent weeks, the privately held Cancer Treatment Centers of America has sold the assets of its Philadelphia hospital and closed its hospital in Tulsa.
Free
“A document in perspective” is a new feature of the Cancer History Project.The objective is to take a noteworthy document—be it prescient or naive—and illuminate it by placing it in proper historical and scientific context.
This was not your ordinary ODAC, but a three-day checkpoint inhibitor marathon that consumed April 27, 28, and 29. You might call it six ODACs for the price of one: subtle as all get-out, if-you-blink-you-miss-it head-spinner of a shindig.
Free
In a three-day meeting this week, the FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee will be asked to determine viability of six indications for drugs that target PD-/PD-L1 proteins.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
The boundary between basic science and engineering has been the subject of animated discussions in cancer research for quite some time. Where does science end and engineering begin? Is that boundary porous? How does it shift over time?
Free
An award-winning investigative documentary film about power morcellation—a once-popular “minimally invasive” surgical procedure—is now available on major streaming platforms.
Free
Karen E. Knudsen was named CEO of the American Cancer Society and its advocacy affiliate, the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Robert Stone: City of Hope aims to transform cancer care nationally through new models, partnerships
City of Hope has received a $50 million gift for a 190,000-square-foot outpatient center in Irvine, Calif.As a result of the gift, from Lennar Foundation, an offshoot of a building company, the facility, which is slated to be opened in 2022, will be named Lennar Foundation Cancer Center at City of Hope Orange County.
Health Disparities
We are shocked and horrified by the recent spate of violence and hate crimes against people of Asian and Pacific Islander descent across the United States.In response to these events, The Cancer Letter is stepping up coverage of inequities and disparities—and we are seeking your help and guidance on an upcoming series of investigative stories.As a publication that actively advocates for racial justice and health equity, we condemn these attacks, which have led to deaths, severe injuries, and widespread fear in AAPI communities.
Obituary
José Baselga, an expert in the development of molecular targeted agents and an executive at AstraZeneca, died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob, an extremely rare, rapidly progressing, degenerative brain disorder.
Free
In 1995, a group of doctors who advocated treating breast cancer with high dose chemotherapy with bone marrow transplantation made an attempt to include that highly toxic procedure in the guidelines of the nascent National Comprehensive Cancer Network.
An ad hoc group formed by NCI to provide advice on the slowly-accruing TMIST—Tomosynthesis Mammographic Imaging Screening Trial—recommended that the trial be streamlined, but should continue.
Free
Late in 1997, when Bruce Ross told me that Bill McGivney would replace him as CEO of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, I thought the recruitment made sense.
FDA will hold a three-day meeting of the Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee April 27-29 to consider five indications that received accelerated approvals, but that have not been shown to produce a clinical benefit in confirmatory trials.
Free
The National Comprehensive Cancer Network, an organization that promulgates guidelines based on standards of care provided at academic institutions in the U.S., is indisputably one of the pillars of oncology today.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Last year, Fox Chase Cancer Center stood poised to make history by becoming the first NCI-designated cancer center to be sold on open market.
Three companies withdraw cancer indications for PD-1/PD-L1 drugs in FDA’s “industry-wide evaluation”
Over the past three months, three pharmaceutical companies voluntarily withdrew three cancer indications for drugs that had previously received accelerated approvals from FDA, but ultimately failed to meet agreed-upon endpoints in confirmatory trials required for regular approvals.
Free
A quarter century ago, on March 3, 1996, in Ft. Lauderdale, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network held a conference—its first.
Free
Five academic cancer centers have formed a unique research alliance, Break Through Cancer, to focus on four cancer types—pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer, glioblastoma, and acute myelogenous leukemia.
In a unanimous vote, the FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee recommended against an accelerated approval for Keytruda for patients with high-risk, early-stage triple-negative breast cancer, in combination with chemotherapy as neoadjuvant treatment, then as a single agent as adjuvant treatment after surgery.
Conversation with The Cancer Letter
Being Black and running an NCI-designated cancer center at a time of a worldwide pandemic, an ugly election, and a racial reckoning in a Southern town puts you in a position to make profound observations.
