Noted

Under an omnibus spending bill approved by the U.S. Congress, the NIH will receive a $2 billion budget increase for fiscal year (FY) 2016, bringing its total budget to $32.084 billion. Similarly, the NCI and FDA will receive budget increases of more than 5% over their FY2015 budgets. All three agencies have experienced flat funding or outright cuts for more than a decade.

According to an analysis by the online health and life-sciences publication STAT, 90% of academic and nonprofit institutions and 74% of drug and device makers do not submit clinical trial results to ClinicalTrials.gov within 1 year of a study's completion, as mandated by law. Although fines can be imposed for failure to comply with the law, none have been levied; STAT estimated that the government could have collected $25 billion from drug companies alone over the past 7 years.

Steady reductions in smoking, combined with advances in cancer prevention, early detection, and treatment, have resulted in a 23% drop in the cancer death rate since 1991, averting more than 1.7 million cancer deaths through 2012 (CA Cancer J Clin 2016 Jan 7 [Epub ahead of print]). Also, between 2002 and 2012, mortality rates have declined by 1.8% a year in men and 1.4% in women.

Three-dimensional structures of faulty proteins and maps of cancer's communication networks have been added to the canSAR database, launched in 2011 by researchers at The Institute of Cancer Research in London, United Kingdom. canSAR was created to help researchers build a detailed picture of how known human molecules behave and design new cancer treatments. It is available at https://cansar.icr.ac.uk.

Despite some promising signs, phase III studies of evofosfamide (TH-302) for the treatment of soft-tissue sarcoma and pancreatic cancer did not meet their primary endpoints, prompting Merck KGaA, which had partnered with Threshold Pharmaceuticals, to stop its development.