Eric Winer, MD, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Breast Oncology Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, discusses presurgical trials for breast cancer and the roles such trials may eventually play in drug approvals.

Some crowdsourcing platforms ask workers to express their opinions by approving a set of k good alternatives. It seems that the only reasonable way to aggregate these k-approval votes is the approval voting rule, which simply counts the number of times each alternative was approved. We challenge this assertion by proposing a probabilistic framework of noisy voting, and asking whether approval v...

Blanket bans on all growth-promoting or prophylactic drug approvals are controversial and arguably unwarranted and counterproductive. Nevertheless, legislation, consumer preference, and trade opportunities have encouraged some producers to grow broilers with reduced reliance on antibiotics, including completely drug-free production. Drug-free production programs may have varied consequences on ...

Studies of patient safety and comparative effectiveness entail unique methodologic challenges. These studies may be susceptible to systematic error, including selection bias, exposure misclassification, and outcome misclassification. They may also be vulnerable to random error, or confounding by a variable such as another drug, a disease, or the drug indication itself. Finally, special logistic...

The number of cancer medications approved by the Food and Drug Administration has risen steadily in recent years. This article provides a concise overview of drugs and indications added to the cancer armamentarium in 2014 and to date in 2015.