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Winter 2017
Circling the Dome
Last fall, Paul Rothman, dean of the medical faculty and CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine, and bioethicist Jeffrey Kahn joined the esteemed ranks of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine. NAM members, recognized for their outstanding professional achievements and commitments to service, advise the U.S. government on medical and health issues.
Typical out-of-pocket costs, on top of what’s paid to have health insurance, for elderly and disabled people on Medicare after receiving a cancer diagnosis, according to a recent Johns Hopkins study. For some patients, expenditures for treatment add up to 63 percent of their income, noted researchers, including radiation oncologist Amol Narang.
Hospitalizations are a major driver of out-of-pocket costs, the scientists found. “The health shock can be followed by financial toxicity. In many cases, doctors can bring you back to health, but it can be tremendously expensive, and a lot of treatments are given without a discussion of the costs or the financial consequences,” notes study co-author Lauren Nicholas, a health policy researcher in the school of public health.
A new five-year collaboration between The Johns Hopkins University and Bristol-Myers Squibb aims to answer why some patients respond to immunotherapy drugs called checkpoint blockers and some do not, and to develop more effective combination immunotherapies. Projects included in the collaboration will span laboratory research on patients’ tumor samples and several early-stage clinical trials led by Johns Hopkins scientists at the Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.
“We’re at an inflection point of understanding the root causes of response and resistance to immunotherapy, and this collaboration will help propel the research needed to identify ways to expand immunotherapy effectiveness to more patients,” says Drew Pardoll, director of the Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute.
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