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The White House plans to nominate Monica M. Bertagnolli, a Boston cancer surgeon who became director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) last fall, to lead the National Institutes of Health, according to people familiar with the situation. The sprawling federal agency has not had a permanent director since December 2021, when Francis S. Collins, the longtime head of NIH — known for his landmark genetics discoveries and ability to cajole funding from Congress — stepped down. Lawrence A. Tabak, an NIH administrator, has been serving as acting director. (McGinley and Diamond, 4/19)

The White House could change its plans. If it goes ahead with the nomination and the Senate confirms Dr. Bertagnolli, she would take the helm of a federal research agency whose cadre of scientists and $47 billion budget give it a powerful role in investigating diseases and exploring new treatments. ... The Biden administration previously had eyed external candidates for the job, but at least two backed out, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Among the factors deterring interest, people familiar with the matter said, were relatively low pay compared with what the private sector offers and the chance a new president could get elected and want to pick a different leader. (Whyte, 4/19)

Bertagnolli, who previously did stints at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, had won internal praise during her short time at the NCI. She also made headlines shortly after taking the job for disclosing her own early-stage breast cancer diagnosis following a routine mammogram. She wrote at the time that “it’s one thing to know about cancer as a physician, but it is another to experience it firsthand as a patient as well. To anyone with cancer today: I am truly in this together with you.” If confirmed, Bertagnolli would be the second woman to head the NIH. (Cancryn, 4/19)

For many years, there’s been considerable debate about the best age for women to initiate breast cancer screening. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends that women start getting screenings around age 50, while groups such as the American Cancer Society recommend screenings begin at an earlier age. Now a large new study suggests that if Black women begin screening for breast cancer at age 42, that could help lower racial disparities in breast cancer deaths. (Castillo, 4/19)

What if radiation treatments could be given in a handful of seconds rather than weeks of treatments? If surgeons could actually see tumor cells rather than simply hoping they got rid of them all? If scientists could come up with new ways to detect, treat and understand tumors? These were among some of the ideas presented this week in Orlando at the American Association for Cancer Research annual conference, where more than 6,500 scientists shared their work and their hopes for improving the lives of cancer patients. (Weintraub, 4/20)

Many cancer cells shroud themselves in a thicket of complex sugars called glycans that help them suppress immune cells seeking to kill them. But in most of cancer research, these glycans have been ignored because they’ve been exceedingly difficult to study. Stanford biochemist Carolyn Bertozzi had to invent a new field of chemistry, called bioorthogonal chemistry, just to image them — a discovery for which she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2022. (Chen, 4/18)