By Paul Goldberg, editor & publisher of The Cancer Letter
In 1995, a group of doctors who advocated treating breast cancer with high dose chemotherapy with bone marrow transplantation made an attempt to include that highly toxic procedure in the guidelines of the nascent National Comprehensive Cancer Network.
The believers asked to argue their case before the guideline-writing committee, and a meeting took place at a small conference room at the Hilton at O’Hare International Airport sometime in 1995, a bit before NCCN’s first annual conference.
“So, in 1995, when there were seven of us, originally, on the breast cancer guidelines panel, and we put together the first version of the guidelines that I don’t believe were ever published outside of NCCN. And they did not include bone marrow transplantation for breast cancer in any specific place,” Robert W. Carlson, then a Stanford oncologist and chair of the breast cancer guidelines panel, told me in an extensive interview recently.
“And that draft was reviewed by members, then, of the board of directors, some of whom thought that the use of high-dose therapy with transplant in breast cancer should have been included in the guideline itself. They were convinced that the data was strong.”
Read the full story in The Cancer Letter: [ Ссылка ]
