DigitalPaladin

A relative of mine was in the late-stages of cancer, and was not able to find ANY trials willing to accept them. The worst of those trials was out of Baltimore (MD USA), and they ghosted my relative after initial in-person consults that required by relative to drive out of state. Despite the patient's repeated and dogged outreach to the trial authors after that point, there was never an explicit "no" that would let the patient move on, just radio silence instead and that felt cruel to me.

Anecdotally, I can support this.

A loved one is moving through this pathway now. Its has you said: try all the established drugs first, even if they aren't directly indicated for the cancer diagnosis of the patient, then move on to the more modern and specific treatments once the established medicines have failed.

One problem with that approach is, once the patient has reached the point of several failed treatments, the cancer has possibly become advanced and the patient is worn down by the earlier interventions. In my observation, this confluence makes the newer medicines simultaneously harder for the patient to tolerate but also appear less effective than might've been the case at earlier stages of the disease.

Are you referring to monoclonal antibodies? For which a Nobel Prize was awarded in 2018, and research has continued since the 80s?

I'm assuming /s above.

Because the amount of pencil-whipped "peer review" feedback I've received could fit in a shoe box, because many "reviewers" are looking for the CV credit for their role and not so much the actual effort of reviewing.

And there's no way to call them out on their laziness except maybe to not submit to their publication again and warn others against it too.

And, to defend their lack of review, all they need to say to the editor anyway is: "I didn't see it that way."

Oh, yes. Repackaging and reframing of data - as mentioned in the OP article too - is a common practice for farming impact and article numbers too.

Why do novel research when you can just partner up with your friends, bring your data and combine with theirs for the umpteenth paper on the same thing, then wade into spamming down the submissions in every academic journal with impact in your field! If it published once in this journal, surely the 3rd recombination will too (and more often than not... it does.)

I'm a recovering academic, and have not published since not long after defending my dissertation.

I blame this behavior entirely on "publish or perish". The demands for novel, thoughtful and statistically-significant findings is tremendous in academe, and this is the result: cheating.

I left professional academia because I resented the grind, and the push to publish ANYTHING (even reframing and recombining the same data umpteen times in different publications) in an effort to earn grants or attain tenure.

The academia system is broken, and it cannot be repaired with minor edits, in my opinion. This is a tear out and do over scenario for the academic culture, I'm afraid.