Nation’s Top Cancer Doctor Addresses Challenges in Cancer Care and Research
During a visit to the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center on August 8, 2018 Dr. Norman (Ned) Sharpless, director of the National Cancer Institute, sat down with ideastream’s Kay Colby. The discussion centered on challenges related to cancer care across the nation, as well as some key issues to address in the quest to accelerate progress in cancer research and treatment.
Part One: Workforce Development
One challenge stems from the nation’s aging population, often referred to as the Silver Tsunami, and the fact that risk of cancer increases with age. According to the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), by 2030 the incidence of cancer in the U.S will increase by 45 percent creating the need for more oncologists -- especially those trained to care for elderly patients.
Part Two: Clinical Trials
In the last two decades, cancer researchers have come to appreciate the fact that cancer is a collection of hundreds or even thousands of different diseases resulting from countless numbers of DNA mutations in cells. Clinical trials have had to evolve from those that treated single diseases to those that tackle the complexity of cancer. This has given rise to treatments that target specific DNA abnormalities in a patient’s tumor. The director of the National Cancer Institute says this era of “precision and personalized medicine” calls for revamping the system of conducting clinical trials to test new drugs in ways that account for this new paradigm of treatment.
Part Three: Big Data
Developments in cancer care remain hampered by the fact many hospital record systems are incompatible and not designed for research. Therefore, the ability to learn about factors in individual patients that may help or hamper his or her prognosis often lies buried in unharnessed piles of data. Dr. Norman (Ned) Sharpless, director of the National Cancer Institute, says this generates a great need to create infrastructure to mine the benefits of “big data.”
Chapter Four: Continuing Moonshot
In his State of the Union Address in 2106, President Barack Obama appointed Vice President Joe Biden, who lost his son to brain cancer, to lead an initiative known as the “Cancer Moonshot” to help accelerate progress in cancer research and treatment. The Moonshot program spotlights the need to speed up “translational research” in an effort to move scientific discoveries in the lab to timely clinical applications at the bedside. The 21st Century Cures Act enacted by Congress in December 2016 is currently funding many research grants to scientists and clinicians from the National Cancer Institute under the Moonshot program. Dr. Sharpless says that the NCI has some 50 grant announcements on its website now.
