SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Just as it does with treatments, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) offers detailed guidelines on genomic testing by cancer type. These are key in determining what physicians can prescribe routinely and what insurers will cover. But those guidelines aren’t followed regularly outside a major research hospital setting, thereby obviating access to tumor genetic information that could help to better guide treatment. Even if current guidelines are followed, physicians and patients can get information back from the tests that neither party is prepared to process.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Peter Thiel is not a fan of incremental science. The high-profile venture capital investor, who invests across technology and the life sciences via various vehicles, including the Founders Fund, suggested that as academic and government bureaucracies have scaled up and rigidified over the last 50 or 60 years, that has eroded the ability of researchers to pursue innovative science.

SAN DIEGO – Allele-specific KRAS inhibitors are “the most exciting change coming down the pike for treating KRAS-mutant tumors in the near future,” Ferdinandos Skoulidis said at the sixth joint conference by the American Association for Cancer Research and the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer meeting.

SAN FRANCISCO – Atop the stage where, just a year ago, he'd detailed the then-new $74 billion acquisition of Celgene Corp, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. CEO Giovanni Caforio told attendees of this year's J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference he intends to plunge ahead with "the agility and speed of a biotech company."

ORLANDO, Fla. – The world’s biggest and certainly most lavish hematology gathering, the 61st American Society of Hematology conference, just ended in Orlando, having brought 30,024 people from 25 countries to glory in Florida sunshine, if they got outside, but mostly to bask in the discipline’s most up-to-the-minute data.  The amount of research was staggering, with 5,978 abstracts available for review. Key themes included work aimed at overcoming obstacles to CAR T therapy, new progress in preventing and treating venous thromboembolism, moves to address health care disparities and new developments in the care of sickle cell diseases. Late-breakers highlighted new data on Blincyto (blinatumomab, Amgen Inc.), Sanofi SA's sutimlimab, azacitidine and Darzalex (daratumumab, Janssen Biotech Inc.). 

ORLANDO, Fla. – At the 61st ASH annual meeting late-breaking abstracts session, researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital reported that three adult patients who had received an autologous transplant of gene-edited hematopoietic stem cells lacking BCL11A produced high levels of functional hemoglobin and had reduced disease symptoms for at least eight months after transplantation.