Michelle Tregear, Chief Programs Officer at National Breast Cancer Coalition, shared on LinkedIn:
“Exciting advances in cancer treatment are helping more people live longer – but we also need to ask an equally important question: What is life like while receiving these therapies and long after treatment?
This Nature Medicine editorial highlights an important gap: our current approaches to measuring treatment toxicity often fail to capture the long-term, cumulative, and functional impact that matters most to patients.
This resonates strongly with the Common Sense Oncology Values to Action Framework, which calls for cancer research and care to focus on outcomes that matter to patients – not just tumor response, but quality of life, daily functioning, treatment burden, and the ability to live well.
As innovation in oncology accelerates, our approaches to evaluating benefit and harm must evolve as well. If we truly want patient-centered cancer care, patients experiences and priorities must be incorporated from the earliest stages of drug development – not treated as an afterthought.”