Sophie Fessl

Across the European Union, cancer patients often wait months, or even years, for access to promising new treatments already approved by the EMA. Now, the EU’s new Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Regulation is introducing a shared framework for evaluating new…

The length of time it takes for each new cancer drug to reach the market – and more importantly, the patient – remains a cause of deep frustration particularly among those whose lives depend on accessing new options. Concrete data…

Involving patients as equal partners in choosing between treatment options is particularly important when there is considerable uncertainty about how the options could affect their survival and quality of life. Such is often the case in treating older patients, who…

Precision medicine is transforming the way we treat cancer. Oncology is evolving from treating purely on the basis of a broad indication to a tailored approach that is based on a tumour’s molecular characteristics, and usually requires complex combinations of…

The answers to so many pressing questions about cancer, and about how best to diagnose and manage the disease and care for patients, lie waiting to be revealed through analysis of data that is currently spread across tens of thousands…

A nanomedicine, as defined by the US National Institutes of Health, is a “highly specific medical intervention at the molecular scale for curing disease or repairing damaged tissues... ” For regulatory purposes, the term covers products with a size between…

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, consultant clinical oncologist Mohammed Hojouj put out a call for help: “Cancers do not stop growing because there is a war. But cancer patients stop being seen as a priority.” The story he…

Messenger RNA vaccines turned around Europe’s fight against the Covid pandemic. Less than a year after the first lockdowns were declared, mRNA vaccines got regulatory approval for emergency use, first in people at high-risk from Covid, and later in the…

August 7th 2020, much of the world was in various states of lockdown, anxiously awaiting news about progress in development of vaccines against the new SARS-Cov-2 virus, which by then had taken the lives of almost 1 million people. But…

Fiona Henderson was part way through her psychology degree when she received her breast cancer diagnosis. Right after treatments finished, she returned to her studies – initially without a problem. “Three or four months later, I really struggled. I was…