The National Cancer Institute's (NCI) final fiscal year 2013 budget will be about $4.78 billion, a reduction of 5.8% from fiscal year 2012. “We have had to make appreciable reductions in ongoing (non-competing) grants (about 6%), centers and other research programs (6.5%), and research and development contracts (8.5%),” wrote NCI director Harold Varmus, MD, in a message sent to grantees on May 7. “Similar or even larger reductions were applied to the discretionary parts of other budgets, such as research management and support and the intramural program…. We can now expect to fund slightly more than 1,000 new and competing grants—less, but only a bit fewer, than the nearly 1,100 funded in each of the past couple of years.”
Adding genomics-based testing to standard diagnostic workups for endometrial cancer could change the recommended course of treatment for some women with the disease, according to a study of 373 women by The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project (Nature 2013;497:67–73).
In other TCGA work, researchers reported that they have found nearly all the major mutations that occur in patients with acute myeloid leukemia (N Eng J Med 2013 May 1. [Epub ahead of print]).
The cost of treatments for chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) in the United States has reached unsustainably high levels and may result in patients being undertreated or untreated, declared an article supported by more than 100 CML experts (Blood 2013 April 25. [Epub ahead of print]).
In a decision closely followed by drug manufacturers around the world, the Indian Supreme Court allowed makers of generic drugs to keep copying Novartis's Gleevec (imatinib mesylate), known as Glivic outside the United States. The ruling heightened major concerns among pharmaceutical and biotech firms about their intellectual property rights in India and other developing countries.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which gave the federal government authority to regulate tobacco.
For more news on cancer research, visit Cancer Discovery online at http://CDnews.aacrjournals.org.
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