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Released: June 28, 2024

Expiration: June 27, 2025

John Marshall
John Marshall, MD

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Oncology Update: Introduction [00:00:00]

John Marshall, MD: Welcome back to Oncology Update. My name is John Marshall here from Georgetown University, Washington, D. C., the land of freedom. I don't know what it is the land of anymore, but welcome back to Episode 3 of Oncology Update.

Our theme for this session is going to be, how do you stay up to date? How do your patients stay up to date with all that's going on in the world of oncology? And are you, in fact, delivering state-of-the-art treatment? Or are you, in fact, maybe delivering something, some recommendation that maybe AI created? So, we do want to, you know, Be careful about that.

Oncology Update: New and Noteworthy [00:00:40]

But before we do, let's kind of start with some of the news of the week. You know, everyone knows who Dennis Slamon is, an amazing scientist and clinician who, really, his group really defines the whole HER2 targeted pathway, defined the use for trastuzumab in more than one disease and turned HER2 into something that you didn't want, to, now, something it is you want, in certainly in breast cancer. And he, of course, rightfully receives another, major award from the National Foundation for Cancer Research, so a big shout out to Dennis Slamon for the incredible progress that he has made and the impact he's had on so many people. You think about how many lives that man and that science has saved just through that research that he's done. It really is impactful.

On the other side. I want to give acknowledgement to Dr. Harpreet Singh, who worked at the FDA in drug approvals, right? So, the whole idea of giving back to the government, working for not very much money to try and establish the metrics, et cetera, for FDA approval for medicines. But just recently, Dr. Singh took a job as the CMO for Precision for Medicine, which is a, basically a research CRO. And that's very much similar to what we see here in Washington of that kind of revolving door between working for the government and then working for industry. Taking the skills and the inner inside knowledge and the like that's important out to the rest of the world to try and improve the process there. So that's a little bit of what's going on in the world of drug development.

But, maybe most importantly, this is Juneteenth. Actually, we are recording session 3 here, episode 3 here. And it's also part of Pride Month. And so, we have a lot of folks who are out there, who really are underrepresented in our research, underrepresented for access to the treatments we have, for a variety of reasons. Not just here in the United States, but everywhere around the world. And I know many of us are working to try and level that playing field. I always think about this as a really difficult subject, is health care a right or is it a privilege? And we try to dance both of those here in the United States with the private health insurance and other government health insurances underneath that  are clearly not providing the same level of care. And these kinds of months that we think about those who are less fortunate or those who have struggled with their own personal world in a world that's not necessarily built to—ready to receive them. And so, I do think we have to make sure we're taking care of everyone and acknowledging all of that that goes on. So, it's an important month, the month of June for us all to stop and reflect a bit on all of this, particularly in health care.