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The Biden administration took steps to alleviate shortages of cancer drugs for children, part of a final push for one of the president’s domestic priorities: reducing the nation’s cancer burden. The federal government is testing a new way to prevent treatment disruptions for seven pediatric cancer drugs by improving communication between hospitals, nonprofits and wholesalers. Shortages of cancer medicines regularly plague hospitals and patients, sometimes forcing them to delay or change care. (Abbott, 10/28)

Vaccines are the original immunotherapy, in the view of Ryan Sullivan, a cancer immunotherapy researcher and oncologist at Mass General Cancer Center. But many other modes of immunotherapy for cancer were approved first — checkpoint blockade drugs like Keytruda and engineered immune cell therapies like Yescarta. Shadowed by the successes of other therapies, the field of cancer vaccines was “seemingly dying,” Sullivan said. (Chen, 10/29)

For the last five years, Vicky Ni has been battling lung cancer — a diagnosis that came out of the blue in 2019 after she went to a doctor for pain in her shoulder. "He was taking X-rays of my neck, and it was only by chance that the bottom corner of the X-ray showed a raised diaphragm," Ni said. "I was stunned beyond words." The 54-year-old lawyer and mother of two is now part of a medical mystery: lung cancer in nonsmoking, Asian American women had been rising for more than a decade before Ni received her diagnosis. (Cook and Weicher, 10/28)

Middle-aged folks facing a colon cancer screening now have a blood test they can choose over a standard colonoscopy. However, the blood test isn't as effective as colonoscopy at detecting and preventing colon cancer, a new review finds. About two and a half times more colon cancer deaths can be expected to occur in people taking the blood test every three years as recommended, compared to those who undergo colonoscopy once a decade. (10/29)

More than a year has passed since Dana-Farber Cancer Institute dumped Mass General Brigham for a rival hospital chain, but the state’s biggest health care system is making a push now to say when it comes to cancer care, MGB’s still got it. Beginning in 2028, Dana-Farber will end its long and nationally acclaimed adult oncology partnership with Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Instead, it will team up with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to open a new freestanding 300-bed, $1.68 billion cancer hospital in the Longwood Medical Area. (Saltzman, 10/28)