The impact of COVID-19 on human beings around the world has been hard, immense and unremitting so far. The threat from this pandemic to people with acute or chronic medical conditions and weakened immune systems, such as cancer patients, is high. The FDA Oncology Center of Excellence has issued a statement in this connection, reaffirming its commitment to keep the unique needs of patients with cancer as a top priority.

The National Cancer Institute has asked patients with cancer to follow the CDC’s advice on regular washing of hands and keeping hands away from touching one’s face. Other precautions include avoiding travel and crowds and staying at home as much as possible and keeping several weeks of medication and supplies available. Such additional actions are expected to help keep people, at high risk from developing serious complications from COVID-19, safe.

Current Priorities:

Here are the priorities laid out when working to address the critical issues being faced by this patient population:

• The need to coordinate with drug developers, academic investigators, and patient advocates to further the coordinated review of drugs, biologics, and devices for cancer.
• The need to document and approve any required modifications in clinical trials. In doing so, the FDA emphasizes minimizing the risks to trial integrity and promises to assist sponsors in assuring the safety of patients involved, keep patients informed of any changes that could affect them and ensure that compliance with good clinical practice is maintained.
• Requests for Expanded Access shall continue to be processed in order to make investigational therapies accessible to cancer patients when there are no other opportunities for the patient to enroll in a clinical trial.
• The FDA shall work to anticipate and prevent drug shortages that are critical to the treatment of patients with cancer, while continuing to inform the cancer community through regular updates.

The communication also stresses on the need to schedule ongoing treatment appointments, only after carefully weighing the need against the possibility of exposing the patient to a risk of contracting COVID-19, as per the regulatory authority.

Lumiseek offers an innovative technology  platform which enables collaboration between all the oncology-focused stakeholders, including researchers, healthcare professionals, service providers, regulatory agencies, government, investors , pharma and biotech companies, patients and patient advocacy groups. In times like these, effective collaboration between the various stakeholders in the oncology ecosystem could offer immense benefits.

Lumiseek helps to integrate the requirements of all stakeholders, reduce duplication of efforts, cuts the time-to-market and even bring down the costs. It streamlines communication primarily across three broad categories of finding collaborators with complementary expertise, establishing and managing global collaborative projects, and managing your professional network by strategically grouping and segregating shared communication. Lumiseek registers qualified cancer-focused organizations of all types and has mechanisms to securely and privately communicate with them to develop a synergy with their near-term goals. Because Lumiseek is developed by professionals with extensive experience across most functions of the cancer care value chain, all the requirements of various stakeholders in the field of oncology have been considered and incorporated into the platform.