Cancer Chief Takes FDA Reins

Andrew von Eschenbach, named by President Bush as interim head of the Food and Drug Administration, will also remain the director of the National Cancer Institute.

In von Eschenbach, the nation's drug regulatory body gets a new-biology visionary, but also a survivor of melanoma, prostate cancer and basal cell carcinoma, and apparently, judging from his decision to head both agencies, someone with a no doubts about his abilities.

He replaces Lester Crawford, who resigned as chief of the FDA Friday, just two months after being confirmed as commissioner after holding leadership posts in the agency since February 2002.

At NCI, von Eschenbach has outlined an ambitious goal of eliminating “suffering and death from cancer by 2015.”

In testimony before Congress earlier this year, von Eschenbach said cancer research would work to identify, develop and use new biomedical technologies, particularly bioinformatics.


So, in taking on leadership of the embattled FDA, an observer can see no abatement of the agency's drive to adopt new technologies, as it has been, and a drive to accelerate the review process, and a driver for the development of new molecular tools for biology.

In the context of the FDA and new treatments von Eschenbach told The Associated Press: "I believe it's still important to ask the question, 'How can we accelerate the timeline? How can we make certain we are getting these interventions to the patients as quickly as possible?'"

In a speech at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center this year, von Eschenbach said that there is a need to integrate the 60 NCI-designated cancer centers into a network, with the caBIG bioinformatics informatics grid, an initial concrete effort as well as other more complex initiatives including the support for very early-stage and not clearly defined nanotechnology efforts.

Still, the realities are, for von Eschenbach at NCI, his budget for 2006 is the same as 2005 ($4.8 billion), which means less funds for individual researchers. The new biology economy is clearly going to be a team endevour.

"I'd like to see cancer centers take a much more aggressive position on fostering team grants rather than independent investigator research," he told Dana-Farber researchers.

Tags -- Cancer, molecular biology, National Cancer Institute