NCCS Senior Health Policy Advisor Ellen Stovall Responds to Susan Gubar’s “The Cost of Trials”
Susan Gubar's voice as a woman living with ovarian cancer (The New York Times Well Blog, March 20, 2014) clearly describes the dilemma of how to manage some of the most distressing features facing people who want to participate in a cancer clinical trial—namely access to these trials and the matters associated ...
NCCS Joins Alliance for Childhood Cancer in Submitting Comments to FDA
NCCS joined the Alliance for Childhood Cancer in submitting comments to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) following the January 2014 public workshop on complex issues in developing drug and biological products for rare diseases. The Alliance encouraged the FDA to consider the issues specific to pediatric cancers that may ...
Advocating for Clear Coverage for Clinical Trial Services for Medicare Advantage Enrollees
NCCS joined with 20 patient advocacy groups and professional societies to urge the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to correct a long-standing inequity in Medicare coverage by requiring Medicare Advantage plans to provide coverage for clinical trials. Currently, individuals with Medicare Advantage plans must revert to standard fee-for-service ...
Doctors: Too Few Cancer Patients Enroll in Studies
In an article published on January 28th, Marilynn Marchione, Associated Press Chief Medical Writer, explores the issue of enrollment in clinical trials and the impact of patient enrollment in testing new treatments. The article cites the recent analysis of thousands of experiments registered on clinicaltrials.gov lead by Dr. Matthew Galsky ...
NCCS Joins Colleagues in Offering Advice Regarding Standards for Sharing Patient-Specific Clinical Trials Data
The National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship joined colleagues in the cancer advocacy community in offering advice to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regarding the standards for sharing patient-specific clinical trials data with researchers. FDA has proposed that such data be made available to researchers, in hopes that such uses ...
Clinical Trials System Evaluation and IOM Workshop Summary
In the Sunday, July 14, New York Times, Clifton Leaf offered a critical evaluation of clinical trials. In letters to the editor published in the Times on July 18, 2013, several writers rebutted Leaf and defended the clinical trials enterprise. John LaMattina writes in Forbes that Leaf has resorted to ...
Clifton Leaf Opinion Piece in NY Times “Do Clinical Trials Work?”
Clifton Leaf, a cancer survivor and the author of "The Truth in Small Doses: Why We're Losing the War on Cancer - and How to Win It", writes in The New York Times about the challenges that exist in human drug trials and the impact of biological diversity on outcomes ...
PolitiFact Evaluates Obama-Biden Promise to Increase Participation in Cancer-Related Clinical Trials
In 2008, Barack Obama promised to increase patients' access to clinical trials for new drugs by requiring coverage of patient clinical trial costs in the new public and private plans offered through the National Health Insurance Exchange. PolitiFact spoke with several patient advocates, including Shelley Fuld Nasso, a health policy consultant ...
Article Reports Tendency of Investigators to Underreport Side Effects of Chemo in Clinical Trials
In an article in the Annals of Oncology, Ian Tannock and colleagues from Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto report on the tendency of investigators to underreport the side effects of chemotherapy in randomized clinical trials in breast cancer with positive results. The authors also note the tendency of investigators to ...
