January 16, 2025 5pm London UK

Ariadna Tibau Martorell, MD PhD 

Over recent decades, significant advances have improved survival and quality of life for patients with cancer. However, the rise of therapies offering marginal benefits, often at increasing costs, has created a tension between the hope of new treatments and the reality of clinical and financial toxicities. This challenge is particularly acute in incurable cancer, placing a heavy burden on patients, families, and healthcare systems, underscoring the need for targeted improvements. This talk reviews initiatives aimed at addressing these challenges, focusing on identifying and prioritizing treatments that offer meaningful clinical benefits and genuine value to patients in modern oncology.

Video | Slides

February 13, 2025 5pm London UK

Nick Woolley

Established research estimates that nearly 40% of UK cancer cases are preventable, through actions such as reducing tobacco use, reducing obesity and exposure to UV radiation.  The incidence of preventable cancers is also increasing over time. It is likely to reach 226,000 by 2040, up from 184,000 in 2023. Between 2023 and 2040 there will be a total of 3.7 million new preventable cancer cases. Reducing the number of people with preventable cancers would bring significant benefits to individuals and their families, to the economy, and to a wider society. Frontier Economics has undertaken a study to estimate the social and economic cost of preventable cancers in the UK. In this talk, Nick Woolley discusses the total annual cost of UK preventable cancer cases diagnosed each year and how this cost breaks down into the impact on individual, health care, social care, family and carers, and productivity. The talk will explain which cancers are responsible for the highest costs and how these costs might grow up to 2040 based on current trends and attempt to address the following questions: how feasible would it be to prevent the cancers modelled and what might it cost to avoid more cancers? What policy changes would be necessary, and would these be in line with current UK government/NHS thinking? How long would it take for results to be seen?

This important webinar addresses the details of how the costs, in trillions, of not preventing cancers were estimated.

 Video | Slides

February 27, 2025 

James Tabery, PhD 

Ever since the end of the Human Genome Project in 2003, medical geneticists have been forecasting a genomic revolution in healthcare. Initially, this revolution was packaged as “personalized medicine”—the idea being that getting DNA from patients will allow for individualizing treatments and preventive care. Eventually, though, geneticists became concerned that the language of “personalized medicine” misled patients and the public about how medical genetics actually works, and so an effort was made to rebrand the revolution as “precision medicine”. I’ll tell the story of how this scientific marketing fiasco unfolded, explaining how it managed to only compound the confusion surrounding what genetics does and doesn’t bring to medicine.

Video/Slides

March 13, 2025 5pm London UK

Chair: Leeza Osipenko, PhD

Discussants:

Ariane Denoyel (France)
Serena Tenari (Switzerland)
Jeanne Lenzer (USA)

Independent journalists face major hurdles in reporting on healthcare, particularly due to Big Pharma's pervasive influence. Many medical studies and sources, including professional societies and patient organizations, are tied to the industry, leading to overstated benefits and understated risks of drugs and devices. Media outlets avoid critical stories, fearing lawsuits and lacking journalists trained to evaluate clinical trials. Since COVID-19, criticism of prescription drugs or regulatory failures is often branded as anti-science, fuelling self-censorship. Watchdog groups and public trust in health authorities further stifle scepticism, as seen in France, where even scandals like Mediator have failed to erode confidence in regulators. Funding is another obstacle; investigative journalism on healthcare is rarely supported by mainstream media or grants free of conflicts of interest. The pandemic has worsened polarization and tribalism, making it politically risky to discuss pharmaceutical industry misconduct. Despite these challenges, journalists persist in tackling controversial health topics, though outlets willing to publish such stories remain scarce. Join the discussion by the three investigative journalists who will share their experiences and reflect on the challenges of their profession and current environment in different countries.

Video

March 27, 2025 5pm London UK

Gary Schwitzer

Between 2006 and 2022, a team of as many as 50 journalists, physicians, researchers, and a few patients reviewed health care news stories in American media.  The focus was on stories that included claims of efficacy or safety in health care interventions. In all, 2,660 news stories and 600 public relations news releases were reviewed.  Although the project has now ended, the lessons learned from this experience stand the test of time as many of the same flaws recur daily.

Video | Slides

April 17, 2025 5pm London time

Nathan Cherny 

The overtreatment of cancer patients at the end of life is a common problem. This talk explores, why this is happening, the consequences, the complex cultural psychological and cognitive factors contributing to overtreatment, and how it can be mitigated.

April 24, 2025 5pm London

David R. Penberthy, MD, MBA

This is an optimistic talk from a practicing oncologist’s perspective exploring a 30,000’ view of the current state of oncology in the US and the world, and summarizes the excellent scientific progress made regarding oncology care.  We will explore some of the big picture economics of healthcare, and how current trends may be fiscally unsustainable.  Finally, we will explore solutions including how powerful technology can be leveraged to help society meet the needs of our populations.  The future is bright!

May 8, 2025 5pm London time

Lawrence Lynn, MD

While reformers have been focused on “Big Pharma”, the unrecognized emergence of medical science monopolies funded by the NIH may be a more ominous 21st century  development potentially wasting billions of research dollars and severely delaying medical progress. In just one example, a 2023 review in Critical Care demonstrated that only 6% of single center critical care RCT published in prestigious journals were reproducible. Even considering the RCT threshold effect on “reproducibility”, this is entirely indefensible, yet it was largely ignored. Furthermore over the decades, most of the “evidence based” critical care standard treatment protocols for syndromes were

reversed because the subsequent RCT demonstrated that the treatment had either no effect or was harmful. In the most striking example, the standard ventilator protocol derived from a large multicenter RCT was found to be harmful during the COVID pandemic causing the “ventilator revolt” of bedside physicians in 2020. This protocol has been abandoned but the pathological methodology which generated it has not. How did this happen?

Real science operates as a Darwinian ecosystem, wherein the weaker paradigm is displaced by the stronger and progress evolves naturally as diligent scientists in the field seek truth, police themselves, and timely abandon, without regard to political expediency, those methods that have consistently failed to render reproducibility. However a centrally controlled science driven by shepherding task forces, who direct funding to their preferred paradigm does not self-correct so it does not progress

toward truth. The science, lacking self-correction, is a pathological science which becomes stagnant and wasteful. In this talk we will discuss how the self-correction feature of science can be destroyed by well-intentioned central control and describe the pathognomonic characteristics of a science monopoly.

Additional reading

May 22, 2025  5pm London time

Jo Waller, PhD

The World Health Organization has published a global strategy for the elimination of cervical cancer as a public health problem. Achieving the strategic targets for HPV vaccination (90%), cervical screening (70%) and treatment of cervical disease (90%) by 2030 requires multi-level intervention. As countries across the globe work towards elimination, this talk highlights the crucial role of psychology and behavioural science in understanding and maximising uptake of HPV vaccination and cervical screening, and communicating changes to existing screening programmes. Consideration will be given to reducing existing inequalities in cervical cancer outcomes.