Noted

President Donald Trump released his proposed budget for fiscal year 2018. To pay for a significant increase in defense spending, he suggests cutting allocations to a number of agencies and programs, including the NIH, which would see its budget slashed by $5.8 billion, about 20% of its current funding.

Multiple challenges are slowing broad implementation of personalized medicine, according to a report from The Personalized Medicine Coalition (available at www.personalizedmedicinecoalition.org). It says that the lack of standardized review of laboratory-developed tests, questions about regulatory oversight of next-generation sequencing, reimbursement concerns, and a lack of awareness about the value of personalized medicine have stymied its adoption.

Researchers have found that deaths from childhood cancer may be nearly four times more common than previously thought. They point to a clinical trial involving children with acute myeloid leukemia in which 1.6% of patients died (J Clin Oncol 2017 March 6 [Epub ahead of print]). In contrast, records in the SEER database show that about 6.2% of young patients die of the disease, noting that these children often don't live long enough to receive treatment or enroll in a clinical trial.

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and GlaxoSmithKline will collaborate with UK Biobank to sequence samples collected from 500,000 volunteer participants over the past 10 years. The companies aim to sequence 50,000 samples by the end of the year; sequencing of all of the samples in the UK Biobank is expected to take 3 to 5 years.

The UK's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence said that women should be offered anastrozole if they have a family history of breast cancer to reduce their risk of developing the disease. Based on recent data, researchers concluded that if 1,000 postmenopausal women at high or moderate risk of breast cancer took anastrozole for 5 years, 35 cases of breast cancer would be prevented, compared with 21 if they took tamoxifen.

For more news on cancer research, visit Cancer Discovery online at http://cancerdiscovery.aacrjournals.org/content/early/by/section.