Posts by tag
covid-19
Highlights of 2020 American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting
Like most 2020 meetings the 62nd American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition, held 5-8 December, was hosted virtually. Due to meticulous planning, the format did not prevent delegates attending the largest gathering of the professional haematology community…
Building back cancer services after Covid-19: European Cancer Organisation plan
The European Cancer Organisation has proposed seven urgent recommendations to ‘build back cancer services better’ after the ongoing challenges resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic. ‘The Impact of COVID-19 on Cancer in Europe’, launched during the European Cancer Summit on the…
A silver lining: Could changes forced by the pandemic point to better ways to conduct our clinical trials?
Pragmatic adjustments to trial protocols were seen to be essential during the Covid-19 pandemic to avoid trials being abandoned or delayed. Most changes involved reducing the requirements for travelling to centralised trials centres and reducing the level of reporting requirements.…
These COVID days
‘Tackling cancer in interesting times’ was the theme of my first Editorial for Cancer World. I wrote that at the start of February this year, at a time when Europe remained largely oblivious to the implications of a new virus…
Could covid-19 boost interest in drug repurposing in oncology?
Could the frantic search for drugs to treat patients severely affected by the covid-19 virus be a shot in the arm for new cancer treatments? There have been many headlines about repurposed agents, such as the highly debated antimalarial drug…
COVID-19 diagnostic delays predicted to increase cancer deaths
Substantial increases in the number of avoidable cancer deaths in England are predicted as a result of diagnostic delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, report two modeling studies published in the August issue of Lancet Oncology. Both studies underline the…
Workload doubled, resources halved: cancer patient groups need help to survive the pandemic
COVID-19 is creating significant challenges for millions of cancer patients around the world, including delays in diagnosis and treatment ‒ all made worse by an underlying concern about the essential safety of cancer patients during a pandemic. Since the outset…
Link between COVID-19 and prostate cancer raises possibility of new treatments
The overlapping biology identified between the molecular pathogenesis of COVID-19 and prostate cancer raises the possibility of repurposing drugs, including androgen deprivation therapy, for treating COVID-19, suggests a review in Nature Communications Biology, published 8 July. In the review the…
Contagion: a narrative approach to understanding the psychological and social impact of the pandemic
‘Contagion’ seems like an outdated word in medicine. Transmissible illnesses are no longer described as ‘contagious’, they are ‘infectious’, and we study ‘infective’ agents. Contagion is a term evocative of the medical past. Talking and writing about contagion evokes the…
COVID-19 is delaying diagnosis, but getting back to normal is not what we need
Across the globe, all human and technical resources in healthcare are currently focused on dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, which is having an impact on other areas of healthcare. At Digestive Cancers Europe, the patient advocacy group for people with…