Nancy Roach is the Founder of C3 and Chair of the Board of Directors.

On September 14, I participated in the second Conference on Clinical Cancer Research, hosted by Friends of Cancer Research and the Engelberg Center for Health Reform at the Brookings Institute.  The 2008 conference identified specific areas of clinical research that could be “de-bureaucracied”.  In 2009, the conference presented the progress made in the past year, and identified next steps.

Following is background and a report on my panel’s discussion regarding centralized review of scans to determine progression free survival in phase 3 trials.

Warning: this meeting delved into highly technical aspects of clinical research, so the following is a little geeky!

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Catherine Knowles is C3′s new Director of Policy

The health care reform debate continues.  Last week, the Senate Finance Committee discussed Senator Baucus’s proposal and considered hundreds of amendments.  The Committee will hold a final vote on the proposed bill later this week.  This will allow the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) time to complete its analysis of the bill and provide a final cost estimate.  After the Finance Committee has approved the bill, it will be combined with the bill from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee before it is scheduled for a vote on the floor by the full Senate.

C3 has been closely following the various health reform proposals introduced in Congress, because access to care is critical to preventing, treating and beating colorectal cancer.  Please feel free to share your thoughts with us by leaving comments below.

Continue reading for more information on some of the amendments adopted by the Senate Finance Committee that C3 thinks are important for people living with colorectal cancer.

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Briefly: More colorectal cancer patients experience severe rash from Erbitux than other cancer patients, and significantly more men and younger people have severe rash than women and patients over 70.

Where you live in the United States makes a big difference in your risk of being uninsured from more than 40 percent of people living in Houston to a little more than 3 percent of those in Worchester, MA.

A new method of testing cancer drugs directly on fresh tumor tissue may speed drug development by reducing the need for the earliest human testing. Read the rest of this entry »