Public Policy Resources

In response to a request from Reps. Upton and DeGette for ideas to include in Cures 2.0 legislation, ACS CAN and six other organization urged the representatives to consider the recommendations for overcoming barriers to clinical trial participation published as part of a recent landscape report.

In October 2019, CMS revised its earlier National Coverage Decision (NCD) regarding Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS).  CMS recongized that its previous policy had unintended consequences with respect to germline testing and modified its policy.  While ACS CAN supports this policy change, several

The National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides technical, operational, and financial support to almost all state cancer registries to help ensure data collected are representative of the U.S. population.

Clinical trials are the key step in advancing potential new cancer treatments from the research setting to the cancer care clinic, and patient participation in trials is crucial to this success.

ACS CAN responded to the reopening of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) coverage decision for NGS testing panels.

Restrictive eligibility criteria are the second leading cause preventing patients from enrolling in cancer clinical trials.  FDA recently issued draft guidance encouraging trial sponsors to use a science-based approach that would allow a wider variety of patients to participate in cancer clinical trials.

Over 80 organizations are urging Congress to take up and pass reform to modernize the oversight of diagnostic test. 

For oncology biomarkers, commercial payers uniformly cover companion diagnostics because clinical utility is established as a component of FDA review (there is typically a therapeutic agent that is approved in parallel).

This bill would modernize and harmonize oversight of in-vitro diagnostic tests, and ACS CAN provided feedback to draft legislative language.  The feedback addressed core issues of interest to patients.