In the Headlines: “There's no one to stand up for NCI right now.”

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 admittedly large department that was responsible for maintaining:

• NCI’s website, which the majority of NCI’s divisions, offices, and centers rely on to do the work that they need to do, according to an inside source.

• Physician Data Query, a freely available source of reliable, regularly updated, unbiased cancer-relevant evidence for health professionals, cancer patients, and the general public. The PDQ is “unparalleled,” experts said.

• NCI’s Cancer Information Service, which is an interactive contact center that provides an online chat service, a patient hotline, an email service, and social media interactions.

“We are kind of seeing pieces of it that nobody else cares about, except if you're really deep within oncology,” Paul said. “But what happens next is all of this is going to come down on the actual people, the actual patients very quickly. And then, the whole field gets transformed, and this whole political situation gets transformed because I don't believe that House members or Senate members of either party want to be confronted by cancer patients who are saying, ‘Hey, you're killing me.’"

Stories mentioned this week include:

• Trump administration is removing the mainstays of NCI and the federal government’s cancer program. Peer review, registries, and evidence-based patient information take a big hit.

• George Weiner: Cancer centers are special, as are site visits in CCSG review. 

• Cyber-iconoclast Vinay Prasad named head of FDA’s CBER. An oncologist, Prasad has criticized accelerated approval, next-gen sequencing, and targeted therapies.

• Working with cancer: Rethinking long-term health for working-age adult cancer survivors

• Walter Lawrence Jr.: “The National Cancer Act really gave us a lot of enthusiasm about the future.” 

A transcript of this podcast is available: https://cancerletter.com/podcastc/20250514-NCI/