• Harold Varmus, MD, director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), said that the NCI will expand its “zone of likelihood” for applications for grant funding from those scoring in the seventh percentile and better to the ninth percentile and better for fiscal year 2013. Grants scoring below the ninth percentile can be funded after an additional review. NCI aims to support about 1,100 new grants in FY 2013, which is in line with previous years.

  • India plans to build a National Cancer Institute facility that will be the nation's largest cancer center at an All India Institute of Medical Sciences campus outside New Delhi.

  • Sanoficut the price of Zaltrap (ziv-aflibercept) in half after criticism of the drug's cost-effectiveness in The New York Times by 3 Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center physicians. The move “represents a success in moving toward value-based systems of care,” commented Debra Patt, MD, MPH, in Community Oncology.

  • The U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted priority review for marketing approval of trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1; Genentech) in the treatment of people with HER2-positive, unresectable locally advanced or metastatic breast cancer who have received prior treatment with trastuzumab (Herceptin; Genentech) and a taxane chemotherapy.

  • The NCI gave the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center a $28.4-million, 5-year grant and renewed its designation as a Comprehensive Cancer Center. The University said that it has received the most NCI funding among U.S. academic medical centers, with the Cancer Center receiving a total of $79 million in 2011. After submitting a 1,937-page grant renewal to the NCI, the Cancer Center underwent a 2-day site visit by reviewers in fall 2011.

  • Beginning as early as spring 2013, the NIH “will begin to hold processing of non-competing continuation awards if publications arising from grant awards are not in compliance with the public access policy,” wrote Sally Rockey, PhD, deputy director for extramural research, in an entry on her blog.

For more news on cancer research, visit Cancer Discovery online at http://CDnews.aacrjournals.org.

©2012 American Association for Cancer Research.
2012