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 Fred Hutch Cancer Center, an NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center in Seattle.
“To stop that flow of ideas from universities and from hospitals to pharmaceutical companies, it is going to basically hand the future of biopharma to countries outside of the United States,” he said.
Burris, president of Sarah Cannon Research Institute, a for-profit community oncology research enterprise in Nashville, agrees.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do. But so many patients, so many new therapies, so many drugs. In that sense, the opportunities have never been greater,” Burris said.
“But on the other hand, we’ve got all the, as Tom uses the word, ‘uncertainty’—all this unrest, wondering how we’re going to be able to pay for this, how we’re going to be able to reimburse for various activities,” Burris said. “And really trying to have my team not get distracted and try to reassure them that financially we’re going to be okay, we’ve got to be diligent, we’ve got to think about how we handle those, but to really stay focused on the patients, the trials and the new drugs that are coming forward.
“And that’s been a bit of a challenge and more so of a challenge of late.”
Julie Gralow, chief medical officer of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, appears on this episode as a discussant.
This episode is sponsored by the American Society of Clinical Oncology. ASCO plays no role in the editorial direction of this podcast.
The transcript for this episode is available: https://cancerletter.com/podcastc/20250516_1/
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