The Cancer Letter

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...

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,...

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,” sai...

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...

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...

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 operati...

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 ma...

“We are resolute. We are committed to continuing to move the work forward,” said Louis M. Weiner, director of Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center.  Taofeek Kunle Owonikoko, executive director of the University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center, recalled recent conversations with two junior faculty members.  “I had to reassure them, ‘Yes...

Up to 80% of adolescents and young adults with cancer are affected by reduced fertility after treatment—but only 50% received oncofertility counseling and preservation options prior to beginning treatment. In this episode of In the Headlines, Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor of The Cancer Letter , and Claire Marie Porter, reporter, talk about how oncofertility, now a standard of care, is often ove...

In the absence of the federal funding, cancer research will be leaning on private funders. But few private funders have the freedom to ask fundamental questions—questions whose answers may not have an immediate clinical impact but can dramatically advance scientific knowledge.  In this episode of In the Headlines, Paul Goldberg, publisher of The Cancer Letter , and Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor...

“For the last 50 years every major medical breakthrough can be traced back to investments in the NIH, which houses the National Cancer Institute (NCI),” said Wayne A. I. Frederick, interim chief executive officer of American Cancer Society and the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. In this episode of In the Headlines, Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor of The Cancer Letter , and Claire M...

In this episode of the Cancer Letter Podcast, all three of The Cancer Letter ’s reporters come together to talk about the potential impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs on cancer care. Claire Marie Porter, reporter with The Cancer Letter , Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor and reporter, and Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher, discussed last week’s story, “ Trump’s tariffs will likely affect...

With a growing backlog at NIH and Columbia University’s grants getting canceled over alleged antisemitism, where does that leave NCI-designated cancer centers? Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter , and Claire Marie Porter, reporter, discuss this and more on the latest episode of The Cancer Letter Podcast. Stories mentioned in this podcast include: The Directors: Ray DuBois and...

In March 2025, the dawn of the Trump era, what's keeping cancer center directors up at night? What's it like to be a director of a cancer center now? In the second installment of The Directors, a series on The Cancer Letter Podcast, we asked Raymond DuBois, director of the Hollings Cancer Center in Charleston, South Carolina, and Roy Jensen, director of The University of Kansas Cancer Center, what...

President Trump’s nominee for NIH director extolled the importance of transparency—just days after HHS rescinded a Nixon-era policy intended to enhance it.  Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter , and Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor, discuss Jayanta Bhattacharya’s stance on the mass firings sweeping through HHS, Trump’s proposed cap on indirect costs, and more this week on The...

In this episode of In the Headlines, Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor of the The Cancer Letter , and Claire Marie Porter, reporter, discuss Claire’s interview with an NCI employee who was fired just days after returning from parental leave. The story provides a personal perspective from one HHS employee who was fired as part of Department of Government Efficiency’s mass termination of probationary...

In this episode of In the Headlines, Paul Goldberg, publisher of The Cancer Letter , and Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor, talk about controversial data cited in Trump’s “Make American Healthy Again” executive order that claims that the U.S. has the highest age-standardized incidence rate of cancer globally. But where did that data come from? In a story in the most recent issue of The Cancer Lette...

In this episode of In the Headlines, former NCI Director Kimryn Rathmell speaks with Paul Goldberg, publisher of The Cancer Letter , and Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor, about the HHS layoffs and their potential impact on mental health. These layoffs—and the broader uncertainty introduced by the current administration’s actions—are a form of trauma, Rathmell says.  In Rathmell’s latest column, “...

In this episode of The Cancer Letter Podcast, we convene a special panel of people who have played a role in the discovery of the EGFR mutation in lung cancer. The panel is moderated by Suresh S. Ramalingam, a lung cancer expert, executive director of Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, and editor-in-chief of the journal Cancer . Other members of the panel include: Katerina Politi, PhD,...

Is the Community Outreach and Engagement mandate the next item on the chopping block as the Trump administration makes its mark on science policy? What about health disparities research? “If we got rid of Outreach and Engagement, I think it would be almost like losing a major foundational aspect of a cancer center,” Robert A. Winn, the director at Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Cen...

In this episode of In the Headlines, Paul Goldberg, publisher of The Cancer Letter , and Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor, discuss the “doomsday scenario” facing academic cancer centers that would follow the success of President Trump’s move to limit indirect costs to 15% for NIH-funded institutions.  The topic of indirect costs has been “something you don't talk about in polite company,” Paul...

Welcome to The Cancer Letter Podcast—a weekly podcast featuring interviews, discussions, and more to dig deep into the issues that shape oncology.