The Cancer Letter

In this week's episode of The Cancer Letter Podcast, editor and publisher Paul Goldberg, and associate editor Jacquelyn Cobb revisit two of last week’s most-read stories: the growing recognition that early-onset colorectal cancer requires a new diagnostic mindset, and the life and legacy of Maura Gillison, the scientist whose discovery that most head and neck cancers are driven by HPV transfor...

In this week’s episode of The Cancer Letter Podcast, Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter , and Sara Willa Ernst, reporter, break down HHS’ latest vision for the future: Operation Trailblazer.  The report is titled: “HHS Roadmap to Maintaining U.S. Leadership in Early Clinical Research and Development.” “The U.S. is apparently losing its leadership in INDs and early phase resea...

“Institutions are feeling crunched at so many different directions” How’s this for a paradox: The better cancer centers become at keeping patients alive, the more expensive cancer care becomes. This brutal tradeoff hits harder in rural areas, where the cancer burden is higher and the investigator and clinical trial representation is lower. The federal budget introduced last summer dealt Medicaid a...

In this week's episode of The Cancer Letter Podcast, Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher, and Sara Willa Ernst, reporter, go on a trip into the world of federal health policy surrounding psychedelic medicine.  In April, FDA issued National Priority Vouchers to three companies conducting clinical trials of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression and major depressive disorder, and methylon...

This Pride Month, Peter F. Garrett appeared on The Cancer Letter Podcast to talk about what his experience during the HIV/Aids crisis has taught him about effective healthcare communication and advocacy. Garrett spoke with Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter , and Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor.  In the 1980s, Garrett was a closeted gay man in his twenties. He met his now-hu...

The oncology community is still riding the high of the success of daraxonrasib—the first drug to show real promise in treating metastatic pancreatic cancer. The drug doubled overall survival for patients in the phase III RASolute-302 trial. At the same time, science continues to become increasingly politicized. The White House Office of Management and Budget released a 412-page proposal May 29 tha...

At the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting, the plenary sessions are one of the main events. A handful of clinical research studies are chosen from the thousands that are presented at the conference to represent the biggest achievements from the field in the last year.  This year, results from the phase III RASolute-302 trial were the unequivocal highlight of the plenary hall. Wit...

Getting NCI clinical trials to the community has never been a simple matter. Has it been getting simpler or more difficult? How does research get done at the NCI Community Research Program sites?  To take the pulse of research in the community, The Directors podcast invited two NCORP principal investigators to ask the questions usually posed to directors of America’s cancer centers: What’s keeping...

While every agency under HHS, particularly FDA, has seen historic leadership shakeups and massive cuts to personnel and funding over the course of the second Trump administration—NCI has been spared, even getting a small raise, under the direction of NCI Director Anthony Letai. “For some reason the wheels have not come off NCI, the wheels are very much on and it's kind of moving forward,” said...

In last week’s issue of The Cancer Letter , the cover story featured something special: The first de novo book published by The Cancer History Project. The book, “Backwater to Blockbuster:  St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital,” co-written by Charles J. Sherr and William E. Evans, chronicles the previously untold story of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and its rise to becoming a global lea...

In last week’s issue of The Cancer Letter , Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter , and Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor, each had a big story: Jacquelyn wrote about the  April 30 meeting of the Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee, and Paul wrote about Vinay Prasad’s inaccurate claims on his CV.   In this week’s episode of The Cancer Letter Podcast, Jacquelyn and Paul talk more a...

The Cancer Letter’s coverage of HHS-led overhauls of foundational scientific institutions continued last week with two unrelated stories pointing to continued disarray amongst public health leadership. In this week’s In the Headlines, Claire Marie Porter, Sara Willa Ernst, and Jacquelyn Cobb, reporters with The Cancer Letter, talk about 1) HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to reform th...

The intersection of art and education is well established, but its application in oncology remains limited.  Last week’s issue of The Cancer Letter featured two stories about the role of art in cancer outreach and education—one about a comic book designed to increase cervical cancer screening and HPV vaccination in Nigeria, the other about a film festival comprised of films directed by cancer surv...

Getting NCI clinical trials to the community has never been a simple matter. Has it been getting simpler or more difficult? How does research get done at the NCI Community Research Program sites?  To take the pulse of research in the community, The Directors podcast invited two NCORP principal investigators to ask the questions usually posed to directors of America’s cancer centers: What’s keeping...

In recent months, several directors of cancer centers, appearing on The Directors segment of The Cancer Letter Podcast, mentioned that their institutions are increasingly providing small grants—typically in the range of $50,000—to scientists to enable them to keep their labs open. Andrew Chapman, director of the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson, said he and other officials at Jefferson des...

FDA has cleared the first at-home self-collection kit for HPV screening, removing significant obstacles to cervical cancer detection.  The kit includes the only FDA-approved HPV assay to individually identify six high-risk genotypes and is the most comprehensive HPV screening tool available in the U.S. today. “The population that ends up dying from cervical cancer, which is highly preventable, are...

The Cancer Letter ’s most recent cover story featured an in-depth Q&A with Anthony G Letai, director of the National Cancer Institute.  In this week’s episode of The Cancer Letter Podcast, Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter , and Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor, shared the behind-the-scenes editorial decisionmaking behind the story. “It might almost read a little bit of...

The new 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, or DGA, which inform federal nutrition policies, school meals, and public health education were announced by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier this year.  On this episode of The Cancer Letter Podcast, Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor with The Cancer Letter , and Claire Marie Porter, reporter, lament a missed opportunity for cancer pr...

Vote For The Cancer Letter Podcast at the 2026 Webby Awards! https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2026/podcasts/shows/science-education Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month is putting a sharper edge on an uncomfortable question: if colorectal cancer is now the leading cause of cancer death in people under 50, why aren’t more people getting screened? The incidence of early-onset cancers have bee...

Leadership is changing at The Wistar Institute and the Helen F. Graham Cancer Center & Research Institute in the months to come—but the leaders of the two institutions say that this will have little if any effect on the clinical-research collaboration that they have spent the past 15 years building. Dario C. Altieri, president and CEO of Wistar, director of the Ellen and Ronald Caplan Cancer C...

Last week’s issue of The Cancer Letter was dominated by one event: the meeting of the National Cancer Advisory Board, the group of experts which advises and assists the NCI director on the activities of the National Cancer Program.  “There are times when NCI is—as a news story—either so stable that it's dormant or so active that it's erupting all the time,” Paul Goldberg, editor and publis...

FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director Vinay Prasad is set to leave the agency for a second time amid controversy.  In a March 6 post on X, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary suggested that Prasad’s presence at FDA was a “sabbatical” from his academic career and that he would be returning to his job at the University of California, San Francisco. “Under Richard Pazdur's leaders...

On Feb. 19, GRAIL Inc. announced that its pivotal NHS-Galleri trial failed to meet its primary endpoint of reduction in advanced stage cancers. The media and the market reacted as one would expect: GRAIL’s stock price halved the day after the announcement and at least three law firms said that they are conducting investigations in preparation for filing investor suits. Despite this, GRAIL has been...

Two lawsuits filed within days of each other in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois claimed that Tempus AI Inc., an AI-driven precision and genomic testing company, had violated the Illinois Genetic Information Privacy Act when it acquired Ambry Genetics and started to integrate its genetics data into its predictive models. “Ambry contained genetic information from a lot...

One of Joni D. Nelson’s biggest influences growing up was her maternal grandmother, or Màma, as Nelson would affectionately call her. Despite a third grade education and limited literacy, Màma showed her “there is an opportunity to change what’s possible” no matter the barriers life sets in front of you. Now, Nelson is the assistant director for the Office of Workforce Development at The Medical U...