Ariel Wittenberg, E&E News: May 4, 2021

President Biden pledged last week to “end cancer as we know it,” a bold promise focused on boosting funding to the National Institutes of Health for a special Advanced Research Projects Agency-Health.

ARPA-H would be similar to the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, acting as a technology incubator by funding high-potential, high-impact projects that are too early for private-sector investment, but with the “singular purpose to develop breakthroughs to prevent, detect and treat” diseases.

“I can think of no more worthy investment. I know of nothing that is more bipartisan,” Biden told Congress last week. “So let’s end cancer as we know it. It’s within our power. It’s within our power to do it.”

But public health experts who have spent their careers examining environmental causes of cancer say it may not be possible to truly stop cancer without EPA stepping in.

The agency has been infamously slow to stop the use of known carcinogens for decades. Those include benzene, arsenic and asbestos, which is responsible for 40,000 deaths per year alone.

“We know that several chemicals are known to cause cancer in humans and others are highly suspect,” said Bob Sussman, an attorney and former EPA official now representing multiple groups in asbestos litigation against the agency. “There are many causes of cancer, but if we don’t address chemicals, we won’t get the job done.”

EPA could help Biden on his mission if it were faster to regulate not just asbestos but also PFOA, phthalates and bisphenol A, said Linda Birnbaum, who formerly led the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Listening to Biden’s address to Congress, she said, she was happy to hear the president “talking about major changes in how society functions.”

“But the focus was on treatment and cures,” she said. “I’m not opposed to treatment and cures, but I think it’s better to prevent if you can.”

Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Health Research, agreed that the nation needs a “two-pronged attack” to end cancer.

“You can’t talk about even reducing cancer without talking about environmental toxins,” she said.

She noted that while Biden did mention a need to research cancer “prevention” during his speech, the medical community often refers to cancer screenings as prevention.

“Screening isn’t prevention; it’s early detection. You’ve already got the cancer; we just found it early,” she said. “If you want to prevent it, you have to deal with what causes it in the environment.”

Asked whether EPA sees a role in Biden’s quest to “end cancer as we know it,” the agency responded only, “EPA is fully on board with President Biden’s agenda.”

It’s not exactly clear what that means. Biden did not mention a role for the agency during the cancer portion of his speech to Congress. But the president’s quest to end cancer is famously motivated by his late son, Beau Biden, who died of glioblastoma in 2015.

[….]

Margaret Kripke, a professor of immunology at the University of Texas’ MD Anderson Cancer Center who has been studying the environmental causes of cancer for years, served on the President’s Cancer Panel in the early 2000s. The culmination of her work on the panel was a report on environmental causes of cancer that said “the true burden of environmentally-induced cancer has been grossly underestimated.”

The paper also took aim at EPA, complaining that “ubiquitous chemicals,” like bisphenol A, were still found in many consumer goods despite growing evidence of links to cancer.

“Not a whole lot has changed since then,” Kripke told E&E News last week, “except that we do know more about cancer and how it works, and how chemical exposures work.”

Unfortunately, she and Birnbaum concur, not everyone agrees about what type of evidence is needed to prove a given chemical causes cancer.

[….]

Kripke said EPA might be empowered to regulate more carcinogens if there were more research, either in the lab or in epidemiological studies.

“I do think it’s on the regulatory agencies, because there are a lot of things that are clearly carcinogenic that are regulated in other countries that are not regulated here,” she said. “But at the end of the day, the agencies can only act on the basis of information, and that information ultimately comes from the research efforts.”

That’s where she hopes Biden’s new mission can help. She said cancer funding is often determined by panels of researchers, who themselves can be biased toward funding research similar to their own. If the purpose of an ARPA-H organization is to fund research that would have difficulty obtaining funding otherwise, she said, studies on the health impacts of chemicals could fit that bill.

“If they are going to have a little broader thinking about what is appropriate for funding than traditional panels made up of people doing current cancer research, then maybe there might be a better opportunity to propose studies on cancer-causing agents or chemicals,” she said.

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment on whether, if approved by Congress, a new ARPA-H would emphasize environmental causes of cancer.

But Zuckerman said she is skeptical that an ARPA-H would mean more funding for research on environmental carcinogens. While ARPA-E, at the Department of Energy, does fund applied and demonstration research for new technologies — the kinds of work private companies don’t find economical — Zuckerman noted that the research is often then picked up and used by companies looking to make money.

“You may get a huge infusion of cash, and yay for that, but it is still within a system where, at the end, there are people who want to earn money off this research,” she said. “You can earn a lot more money off a cancer treatment than you can off reducing pollution.”

You can read the entire article here https://www.eenews.net/stories/1063731675

Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer, Washington Monthly: March 26, 2021

Not since the polio vaccine became available in April 1955 have Americans been so excited about getting a shot. After a year of isolation, fear, and death, most of us can hardly wait to get vaccinated against Covid-19.

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From everything we know about the various Covid-19 vaccines, normal life, or some semblance of it, could return as early as late summer or fall in the United States. The first two vaccines, made by Pfizer and Moderna, appear to be more than 90 percent effective. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine also looks to be quite effective. Thus far, the side effects seem tolerable. If there’s a problem with the vaccines, it’s that production has not kept up with demand and rich countries are scooping up the majority of available doses, leaving poorer countries to fend for themselves.

But behind the scenes, there’s a lot we don’t know, especially about the vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna, which employ a completely novel technology involving mRNA, a type of genetic material. The reason we don’t know it is because of a decision made back in December by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The agency allowed manufacturers to effectively stop their clinical trials as soon as they were authorized to market their vaccines. While the early results from the clinical trials look incredibly promising, we don’t actually know with any precision just how effective and safe they really are – and we probably never will. That might sound like the kind of hairsplitting that hardly matters when a pandemic is raging and people’s lives are at stake, but it does matter for future vaccination campaigns. It’s worth considering why the FDA did it and whether or not that’s how vaccines and other medical products should be regulated in the future.

[….]

Even before the first vaccine came out, there were worries the FDA would not hold the companies’ feet to the fire and make them finish the trials. In an editorial published on September 10, Howard Bauchner, the editor in chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association and colleagues wrote, “prematurely approving a vaccine could undermine Covid-19 vaccine efforts and erode confidence in vaccines more generally.”

Bauchner and others also predicted that once the shots were available to the public, study volunteers would leave the vaccine trials in droves in order to find out if they had gotten the real vaccine or a placebo (dummy shot) – so they could get the vaccine as soon as possible if they were on placebo. That would undermine the studies, effectively stopping them after just a median of two months of data had been collected. Once the studies were stopped and the vaccines were released to the general population, it would be very hard to track side effects and efficacy.

[….]

Back in September, Anthony Fauci, who was then head of President Trump’s Covid-19 task force and remains the chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had already proposed a clever plan. He recommended a “blinded crossover design.” Volunteers who had been in the placebo group would be given the real vaccine, while vaccine recipients would receive placebo—without anybody being told which they had gotten first. In this way, all volunteers would receive the vaccine while allowing ongoing surveillance regarding long term safety and efficacy. When the FDA called in Steven Goodman, an expert in clinical trial design from Stanford, he too endorsed the blinded crossover design, which is commonly used in medical research.

The manufacturers were less than enthusiastic. They told the FDA that executing crossover studies would be “onerous.” In this case, that word translates to “expensive,” and there’s no doubt that continuing the trials would cost more money. Not to mention the fact that the longer the trials went, the more likely it would have been that the vaccines would look a little worse than they did at first, at least in some populations, like people with immune disorders. That’s precisely the kind of data the FDA needs to protect the public health. Nevertheless, with a solution offered by top experts on the one hand, and industry opposition on the other, FDA higher ups made their decision. Instead of insisting on the trials continuing, they asked the companies to “inform the agency” of their plans. Was it pressure from the Trump White House, members of Congress, or some other reason the FDA caved to industry, as often happens? We can’t be sure, but the testing design Fauci and Goodman endorsed would have let the wider public get the vaccine just as quickly.

This decision to cut the trials short could come back to haunt the FDA. For one thing, getting more data could have reassured millions of Americans who are currently “vaccine hesitant” that the agency is looking out for them.

[….]

Another reason longer trials would have been good policy: Public health officials and individual patients would probably like to know who is least likely to be protected by the vaccines and who is most vulnerable to their side effects. Diana Zuckerman, president of the non-profit National Center for Health Research, says, “I’m especially concerned that Pfizer’s vaccine trials included only five people aged 75 and older who were diagnosed with Covid-19.” She adds: “That makes it impossible to determine how effective the vaccine is for frail elderly patients.”

[….]

This episode in the annals of potentially wrongheaded FDA decisions bears directly on the Biden administration’s decision about who to nominate as FDA commissioner. The two top picks are Janet Woodcock, current acting commissioner and 35-year veteran at the agency versus Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean for public health practice at Johns Hopkins. Both are physicians and both have experience at the agency, and that’s pretty much where the similarity between them ends. Woodcock has presided over many of the most questionable drug approvals the FDA has made in recent memory. She sees industry as a “partner,” and she’s the preferred candidate of Pharma, device makers, and several patient groups, most of which receive industry funding – precisely because she has weakened the FDA’s oversight.

Sharfstein comes with a public health perspective and an acute awareness of the need to rebuild the agency’s reputation as independent from both politics and industry. As deputy commissioner of the FDA during the Obama presidency, he proved his mettle when he headed an internal investigation into the approval of an ineffective and harmful medical device.

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Whoever the Biden administration chooses, whether it’s Sharfstein, Woodcock or someone else, Americans need to know the agency charged with protecting their health from dangerous medical products is, as the president often says, “following the science,” rather than the pleas of industry. We should be thankful that we have Covid-19 jabs that can help free us from this plague year. But we may never have the full story on them. The FDA can do a better job in the future.

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