The Cancer Letter

While doing somewhat-routine reporting on this year’s Senate Appropriations Committee bills, Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter, quickly realized that he was seeing a full bipartisan rejection of President Donald J. Trump’s plan to defund and therefore dismantle biomedical research in the United States.

In this episode of In the Headlines, Paul, Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor, and Claire Marie Porter, reporte...

Do multi-cancer detection tests provide a net benefit? NCI aims to answer this question, beginning with the Vanguard feasibility trial which recently started accruing patients.

Sara Willa Ernst, The Cancer Letter’s newest reporter, made her The Cancer Letter podcast debut this week to talk about her first cover story: The launch of NCI’s Vanguard feasibility study.

Sara was joined by Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer ...

NIH has announced it will stop issuing funding opportunities solely dedicated to animal models, but has not published any formal guidance related to the announcement, and researchers are unclear on when or whether further policy materials are to be expected. 

In this episode of The Cancer Letter Podcast, Paul Goldberg, publisher of The Cancer Letter, and Claire Marie Porter, reporter, talk about cancer policy, politics, and NIH’s ne...

As oncology braces for funding, Medicaid cuts, two directors tell young investigators not to panic.

“I don't think any good cancer center director would be worth their weight in salt if they weren't worried about something at night,” said Mark Evers, director of Markey Cancer Center.

Speaking on The Cancer Letter Podcast, Evers and Steven Libutti, the William N. Hait Director of Rutgers Cancer Institute, shared overlapping concerns a...

A new model aims to change the standard of care around medical debt by addressing the financial toll of cancer using a multidisciplinary, tumor board model approach. Now, recent five-year data shows that it’s working. 

This episode is available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 

In this episode of The Cancer Letter Podcast, Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor of The Cancer Letter, and Claire Marie Porter, reporter, talk about the first-eve...

In last week’s issue of The Cancer Letter, the cover story featured Col. Susan Fondy, an Army veteran and stage 3 breast cancer survivor, who is now living with lymphedema. Fondy is now a lymphedema advocate, working to prevent further cuts to the already-sparse funding for the disease.

Fondy’s story is the first of many The Cancer Letter plans to publish in order to highlight the human impact of the current administration's swe...

MD Anderson and Texas Children’s Hospital have entered into a collaboration to build a $1 billion pediatric cancer hospital. The hospital, tentatively slated to open in 2031 or 2032, is on track to become one of the largest pediatric cancer hospitals in the world. 

Peter WT Pisters, MD Anderson’s president, appears as a special guest in this week’s episode of The Cancer Letter Podcast. Together with Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor ...

A 25-year old idea, a concept named “the American Centers for Cures,” proposed by Lou Weisbach, a former CEO of a Fortune 500 company and a political insider, aims to shift the paradigm of research funding. 

In this episode of The Cancer Letter Podcast, Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor of The Cancer Letter, and Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher, talk about Weisbach’s bold $750 billion bond plan aimed at curing diseases. At a time ...

In this episode of The Cancer Letter Podcast, Jacquelyn and Paul talk about the first meeting of the National Cancer Advisory Board, the uncertainty of cancer registries, and about choosing what to cover as the Trump administration “floods the zone.”

At the time of recording, the recording of the two June 10 NCAB meetings had been taken off the videocast website, raising concerns about the availability of public record.

“We do watch ...

Directors of two neighboring cancer centers in Upstate New York will face challenges but “we’ll get through it.”

Candace Johnson leads America’s oldest cancer research center and Jonathan Friedberg leads the newest NCI-designated center. Their catchment areas are contiguous, their faculties and staff work seamlessly together, and together their institutions embody the culture of NCI-designated cancer centers. 

What worries them the m...

“Your entire practice, cancer has been associated with an aging population, and then you have a young, beautiful, healthy-looking woman like Alisa Secaida come into your office, it's not a surprise that the doctor, their knee-jerk reaction would be like, ‘Maybe just slow down,’” said The Cancer Letter’s Claire Marie Porter.

In this episode of In the Headlines, Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter, and Claire,...

“Patients are counting on us, and this remains the best time to be involved in cancer research,” W. Kimryn Rathmell said to The Cancer Letter. 

Rathmell spoke with The Cancer Letter’s Paul Goldberg on her first day as CEO of The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute.

“We can now study, in patients, things that previously before we could only try to...

The Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee held its first session since President Trump’s inauguration, with a two-day, back-to-back marathon meeting, signaling a return to business at FDA after significant upheaval at the agency.

In this episode of The Cancer Letter Podcast, Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter and Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor, talk about Jacquelyn’s coverage of the ODAC “marathon.”

“We've de...

Wafik El-Deiry, director of the Legorreta Cancer Center at Brown University, joined The Cancer Letter’s weekly podcast to discuss his recent guest editorial—and confirmed his candidacy for director of the National Cancer Institute.

“NCI is a place where, truly, innovative, unique science and translation can and need to take place,” El-Deiry said on the podcast. 

El-Deiry spoke with Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Ca...

Thomas J. Lynch Jr. and Howard A. “Skip” Burris III lead two institutions that couldn’t be more different—an NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center on one side of the country and a for-profit research enterprise on the other—but they stay up at nights worrying about the same thing:

“Changing the paradigm of how research is funded and how care is funded, I think makes us all a bit nervous,” said Lynch, president and director of F...

Peer review, registries, and evidence-based patient information have taken a hit in Trump’s first 100 days in office.

In this week’s episode, Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter, and Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor, talk about how the Trump administration’s drastic changes to the cancer research enterprise in the past few weeks. 

Featured in last week’s issue was the recent cut of NCI’s communications team—an ad...

The Cancer Letter has covered—and will continue to cover—all the ways in which the current administration is fundamentally reshaping cancer research in the U.S. But this week, The Cancer Letter and the podcast focused on a patient story. 

In this episode of In the Headlines, Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter, and Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor highlight a profound success story of cancer research: Jacquelyn’...

The National Cancer Registries Program, or NPCR, is a relatively small but highly impactful 33-year-old CDC program that gauges disparities in cancer and tracks progress against the disease. So, why was it left out of the Trump administration’s preliminary budget?

In this episode of In the Headlines, Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter, and Katie Goldberg, director of operations, talk about Paul’s recent story, ...

A confidential Trump administration budget document obtained by The Cancer Letter called for a 40% budget cut to NIH and a restructuring of the 27 existing NIH institutes and centers down to just eight. But what else is in it?

In this week’s episode, Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter, and Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor, talk about other ways the 64-page budget document may impact cancer research. 

It seems th...