Feds: improve cancer therapy

Shortcuts to cancer discovery and moving this quickly through to approval, this is a topic we care about at ACS.

The Food and Drug Administration, the National Cancer Institute, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced this past week the Oncology Biomarker Qualification Initiative – an agreement to collaborate on improving the development of cancer therapies and the outcomes for cancer patients through biomarker development and evaluation.

The HHS press release quotes FDA Acting Commissioner of Food and Drugs Andrew C. von Eschenbach: "An enhanced understanding of clinical biomarkers will help make the development of diagnostics and treatments more targeted, one of our most pressing goals under the Critical Path Initiative, FDA’s program to modernize the medical product development process. We believe partnerships that help us standardize the use of new technologies are essential to refining the drug development process, so we can bring personalized medicines to patients more quickly and ultimately improve outcomes."

Put down that bonbon

I don’t want to be a spoilsport if you’ve just gotten a heart-shaped box of chocolates, but…

Here’s an interesting article by Gina Kolata in today’s NY Times about the long-running debate about diet and health. The low-cab diet goes back at least to the 19th century, and many other approaches have had their day. Making youself healthy or ill by what you eat has its sociological and moral dimensions too.

The article traces the history of the controversy about the relationship between fat and cancer. There’s also the peculiar aftermath of the Women’s Health Initiative study results released a couple of weeks ago. If you’re interested in the diet/nutrition thing, this story provides some interesting context.

Dr. Len's Cancer Blog Launches

The American Cancer Society has launched a medical and scientific blog authored by Deputy Chief Medical Officer Len Lichtenfeld, MD.

On "Dr. Len’s Cancer Blog," at http://www.cancer.org/drlen/,  Dr. Lichtenfeld discusses breaking cancer news while helping to explain and provide commentary on new medical research, scientific developments, and other cancer breakthroughs.

The blog is targeted primarily to journalists and is intended to make tough science easier to understand. It is the latest media relations tool from the national Society designed to create awareness of cancer issues among news media thought leaders. The blog serves as a resource for writers, clinicians, and other bloggers and provides them with a source for quotes or comments for news stories. Recent topics have included colorectal cancer, quitting smoking, pancreatic cancer, lung cancer screening, cancer survivors, and prostate cancer.

Dr. Len Lichtenfeld frequently provides expert staff commentary to the news media on behalf of the Society. He manages the Society’s Cancer Control Science department, whose primary responsibilities include developing the Society’s well-known and widely respected guidelines for the prevention and early detection of cancer. In his role as deputy chief medical officer, he also interacts with many stakeholders throughout the organization nationwide.

Ah, we have an answer

I posted a little article about some research on how quickly people get an impression of a web page. It’s quick; literally in the blink of an eye.

We here’s some real science just reported from Johns Hopkins U about visual perception and how it takes place. Ties in nicely with the observation about impressions.

"Vision doesn’t happen in the eye," Connor said. "It happens at
multiple processing stages in the brain. [...]

"Humans do a rough categorization of objects very quickly,"
Connor said. "For instance, in just a tenth of a second, we can
recognize whether something we see is an animal or not. Our results
show that this immediate, rough impression probably depends on
recognizing just one or more individual parts of what we see. Fine
discriminations – such as recognizing individual faces – take longer to
happen, and our study suggests that this delay depends upon emerging
signals for combinations of shape fragments. In a sense, the brain has
to construct an internal representation of an object from disparate
pieces."