From across the pond, The Guardian of the UK reports on a huge pharma-funded advocacy campaign, but one which the Brits may be smart enough to sniff out and control. Excerpts:
"Cancer United, which is due to be launched with a fanfare in Brussels tomorrow, is being presented as a pioneering effort by a coalition of doctors, nurses and patients to push for equal access to cancer care across the EU. However, the campaign is being entirely funded by Roche, the maker of Herceptin and Avastin. A senior company executive sits on the board. The company's PR firm Weber Shandwick is the secretariat and has been heavily promoting it to clinicians and journalists. And the principal study on which it is based has been hotly contested - and was also funded by Roche.
MEPs and the head of the European Cancer Patients Coalition have already withdrawn from Cancer United's executive board, amid concerns over the funding and lack of transparency.
Roche last night strongly denied the campaign was in effect a marketing exercise.
However, one of the UK's leading cancer experts, Michel Coleman from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told the Guardian he had grave concerns about Cancer United.
"Governments will no doubt be pressed to fund a big increase in expenditure on cancer drugs - on the entirely spurious grounds that such an increase has been proven to increase national survival rates. I wonder if all the dignitaries on the executive board of Cancer United are aware of this murky background.
"Cancer patient groups should think twice before accepting sponsorship from Cancer United."
He is highly critical of the study that is central to the campaign. The report, from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, links patient survival to the amount their government spends on drugs.
Prof Coleman said the report represents "woefully simplistic research... This is clearly nonsense. For most cancers, higher survival results from earlier diagnosis and a combination of expert surgery and/or radiotherapy, as well as from the use of cancer drugs. ... One can be highly critical of European inequalities in cancer survival - and I am critical - but attempting to manipulate public opinion or national cancer policies on the basis of poor science about the availability of cancer drugs is not the right strategy for addressing those inequalities," he said."