Obama Plan Would Double Cancer Funding, Increase Trial Enrollment

From The Cancer Letter, Nov. 7, 2008:

The Obama campaign laid out a clear plan for combating cancer, and now the question is how closely President Obama would follow the plan.

The Obama cancer plan calls for doubling federal expenditure on cancer research over the next five years, increasing accrual to clinical trials to 10 percent of all cancer patients, reinstating the requirement that Medicare pay for routine care costs associated with clinical trials, and instituting public health measures that include colorectal cancer screening and smoking cessation.

For the full story, click on The Cancer Letter Archive at left to download the Nov. 7 issue (subscription required).

Another story in this week's issue reports that several cancer groups, pharmaceutical companies, and NCI are lobbying FDA to spell out how data collection procedures and evidence requirements have changed as a result of the agency’s decision to approve drugs based on their ability to delay cancer progression.

In the process of approving recent applications, the agency has asked for a variety of changes in the methods clinical trialists use to collect data. Demanding these changes, the agency argued that unlike survival, the old, unambiguous metric that used to be the gold standard for drug approval, time to progression is subject to bias and therefore requires different methodology.
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tags: Congress|  FDA|  NCI|  White House