CCBIO opinions on current issues.
Until recently, “targeted therapy” has been limited to pharmacologic inhibition of specific alterations in tumor cells. It is time to broaden that definition to include identifying targets in the TME of selected patients.
Inspiration - focus - people management - teamwork - and luck.
Ovarian cancer is a serious and highly lethal disease. For most women, it is a disease they have never heard of until they are diagnosed with it, making it difficult to understand and accept. Vague symptoms of illness suddenly become translated into a medical diagnosis, and although the disease will...
Since 1999, when the foundation document for precision medicine was published, the term precision oncology has been used to substantiate the importance of genomic information for risk assessment, diagnosis, and treatment selection in cancer. Increasingly more genomic tests are being conducted in...
With the spatial information of the tissue context being lost during the enzymatic cell isolation processes, the relationship between cellular neighborhoods remains hidden, which still represents a key drawback of single cell sequencing methods.
Medical research and researchers, and maybe more in the cancer field than in other disciplines, constitute an international collaborative endeavor where networks across national borders are fundamental. This raises issues on how data regarding the individual can be protected in accordance with rules...
Imagine you are an extraterrestrial scientist observing soccer stadiums on Earth. These strange stadiums/cells present on the surface of the planet are sometimes full of fans/proteins and at other times empty. When they are full, you can detect a variety of noises that coincide with different things...
According to the NIH, precision medicine is “an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person” (NIH Precision Medicine Initiative). Targeted cancer therapy has been the poster child for...
Many countries with publicly financed health care have established systems for evaluating new drugs for reimbursement, with the Norwegian New Methods system and UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) as well-known examples. These institutions have increasingly been criticized...
More than 80% of breast cancers in Norway, Western Europe, and the U.S. are diagnosed in women aged over 50. Although aging is generally associated with loss of function in tissues, age-related cancers may be paradoxical examples of gains of function; e.g. uncontrolled growth and the appearance of...
Young researchers face an enormous uphill struggle when it comes to taking their next career steps, having an overwhelming number of decisions to make even years before the time comes.
It is a truism that translational cancer research has and always will be subject to transformative forces. However technological advances and societal expectations have made us - as researchers, clinicians and citizens - far more aware of these over the last two decades. Where do we stand today and...
The issue of cancer and cancer drugs holds a considerable presence in the Norwegian media. The public interest in the issue has been especially persistent in recent years with the rise and alleged promise of precision medicine.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the young English businessman Cecil Rhodes hired thousands of South African youths to dig diamond mines. These very hard-working young Africans dug a "deluge of diamonds". In just a few decades, Cecil Rhodes became one of the richest men in the world, England...
At CCBIO, we understand that the creation and publication of project results are important milestones, but not the end of the journey. We have anticipated recent research and innovation policy changes at the national and European levels that push for academic research to create greater societal and...
Inter-individual and inter-cellular molecular diversity is associated with specific disease processes as well as with diverse life outcomes. During the last two decades, the attention of biomedical, translational and clinical research has converged towards the study of such molecular heterogeneity,...
In 1989, it was shown that TP53 gene mutations are frequent in human cancers and are associated with poor clinical outcome. In the 90s, it was established that cancer treatments might restore p53 activity, which in turn triggers tumor clearance. The rapid progress enticed clinicians and...
The tumor microenvironement (TME) is a complex meshwork of extracellular matrix (ECM) macromolecules filled with a variety of cells including cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs), blood vessel associated smooth muscle cells, pericytes and endothelial cells, mesenchymal stem cells and a variety of...
In popular culture, “TMI” denotes “Too Much Information”. You ask someone “How are you today?” and he replies “Good, much better than last week when I was so constipated. This morning I was quite flatulent but it seems to have passed.” In almost any other context than that of gastroenterology, this...
The concept of precision medicine emerged on US health policy agendas in the early 2010s and has since gained increasing prominence on both sides of the Atlantic, in part replacing the similar concept of personalised medicine. In the more optimistic imaginations of precision cancer care, every...
The days of the Blockbuster drug are over in oncology. The requirement to demonstrate convincing benefit for patients for a new cancer drug in order to license it is driving increasingly rigorous...
The concept of ELSA - Ethical, Legal and Societal Aspects of Science and Technology - which has been central to the profile of CCBIO since its inception, is gradually becoming supplemented and replaced in Europe by the concept Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI).
The gold standard for a diagnosis of cancer, following clinical and radiological suspicion, has for a long time been the microscopic analysis of simply stained tissue samples. In addition to studying...
An increasingly older population, new and expensive treatments and higher public expectations will make fair priority setting essential to maintain a sustainable and just health care system. Through the work of CCBIO, functional cancer biomarkers can evolve to play an important role in this process.
Repurposing is a recognized strategy in drug discovery and development where a drug already approved for human use, is screened for new effects and new targets. Repurposing is potentially fruitful because we already know that these drugs are introduced to and distributed in the organism with...
Performing a Pubmed search is an important daily activity for a scientist; however, not everyone realizes that we now have access to more than 26 million publications following the quasi-exponential increase in the number of indexed papers in this database over the last 10 years. Even in our own...
Today, less than 1% of researched cancer biomarkers make it to clinical practice. There are several reasons for this, ranging from the complexities and uncertainties characterizing this field, to methodological shortcomings, or indeed the complicated relationship between Big Pharma and public cancer...
Two major challenges seem to limit contemporary targeted treatment of cancer: i) mapping of tumor clonality at diagnosis and during therapy, and ii) identification of patients responding to immunological check-point inhibitors.
Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide and a major health challenge; over half of current adults under the age of 65 years will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lifetime. ...
There are several dimensions to the economics of biomarkers: including the analysis of the pharmaceutical market, the economic evaluation of biomarkers, and the study of how biomarkers influence behavior.
Health Priorities Should Be Open, Just and Smart
