• The National Cancer Institute's fiscal year 2012 budget will be $5.072 billion, a net increase of approximately $12 million from FY 2011. Congress also has approved the establishment of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, designed to “serve as the nation's hub for catalyzing innovations in translational science,” says the NIH, with a budget of $575 million.

  • Life Technology Corp. of Carlsbad, CA, is taking orders for a $149,000 sequencer that sits on a bench and is designed to sequence the entire human genome in a day for $1,000. “The technological advances in the new Ion Proton instrument promise to be game-changing for both research and clinical applications,” commented Richard Lifton, MD, PhD, chair of the Department of Genetics at Yale School of Medicine.

  • The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has asked Congress to approve a user fee program (similar to such programs for new and generic drugs) for an abbreviated approval pathway for biosimilar agents.

  • Research results from the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and Washington University Pediatric Cancer Genome Project (PCGP) are now posted on a free website, http://pediatriccancergenomeproject.org. The PCGP is said to be the largest current effort aimed at whole-genome sequencing of both normal and cancer cells from pediatric cancer patients.

  • Men who were screened annually for prostate cancer had no evidence of a mortality benefit compared to a control group over a 13-year period (J Natl Cancer Inst 2012;104:125–32).

  • Fox Chase Cancer Center, a National Cancer Institute Comprehensive Cancer Center, will become part of Temple University Health System under an affiliation agreement between the 2 Philadelphia organizations.

  • With its fundraising income dropping, Cancer Research UK will cut back on research spending by about £30 million ($46 million U.S.) annually for the next 3 years. It will continue to fund around £300 million in research each year.

For more news on cancer research, visit Cancer Discovery online at www.AACR.org/CDnews.

©2012 American Association for Cancer Research.
2012