This week we discuss management of COVID-19 in the intensive care unit with Dr. Benjamin Singer, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Northwestern University. We discuss medications, PPE, ventilators, and more!

This bonus episode is an interview from March 16, 2020 with Dr. John Townes, the Interim Head for the Division of Infectious Disease and the Medical Director for Infection Prevention and Control here at Oregon Health & Science University. We talk about the novel coronavirus and how healthcare professionals are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on Oregon.

This week we discuss two recent papers -- one we praise, one we condemn -- and then we turn to a question of the week with medical student Audrey Tran on self-improvement and "refining conviction". The first paper is titled "Patient Experience Captured by Quality-of-Life Measurement in Oncology Clinical Trials" and the second is titled "Overall survival in patients with pancreatic cancer receiving matched therapies following molecular profiling: a retrospective analysis of the Know Your Tumor registry trial".

This week we revisit BEACON! The authors of the BEACON study have responded to the Letter to the Editor our host Dr. Vinay Prasad submitted to the New England Journal of Medicine, and we share our thoughts on what they said. We then turn to the FDA's recent approval of neratinib in combination with capecitabine for HER2-positive breast cancer, based on the phase III NALA trial. Finally, we interview Dr. David Carr, a Molecular Pathology Fellow at UC San Diego, on his work in general and, specifically, next-generation sequencing.

Our guest this week is Dr. Michael Hengartner of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. We interview him on his work studying the long-term consequences and effectiveness of newer-generation antidepressants - specifically focusing on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).

We start this episode by diving deep into KEYNOTE-048, the randomized, open-label, phase 3 study of pembrolizumab alone or with chemotherapy v.s. cetuximab with chemotherapy for recurrent or metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck (HNSCC). We transition from there to a continued discussion on careerism in academia and how the motivation behind publishing papers should always stem from the drive to disseminate information, not from the drive to advance your own career. We end the episode with an interview with Dr. Bishal Gyawali of Queen's University in Kingston, Canada on his recent paper out in Nature Cancer on global oncology. Specifically, Dr. Gyawali addresses the need for conducting cancer clinical trials in low- and middle-income countries.

We have a full slate for you this week! We discuss careerism in medicine, presenting abstracts at conferences, #MedTwitter, and Dr. Califf's opinions on the K-Index. We conclude the episode with our first-ever Classical Hematology Chat, featuring our host Dr. Vinay Prasad, Dr. Sven Olson, and Dr. Joseph Shatzel. The chat is on sickle cell disease.

This week we discuss the concept of "thought leaders" and we examine the conclusions about volume CT screening for lung cancer from the NELSON trial. We end with an interview with Dr. Sam Rubinstein, a hematology/oncology fellow at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, on his new paper published in JAMA Network Open titled "Indication of Measures of Uncertainty for Statistical Significance in Abstracts of Published Oncology Trials: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis".

This BONUS episode is the recording of a lecture given to medical students titled "How to Keep Up with the New Information in Medicine." It's a primer on the steps healthcare professionals need to take in order to keep abreast of the latest medical findings.

We have a variety of topics for you this week! We tackle red light therapy, polatuzumab olatuzumab vedotin in relapsed or refractory diffuse large b-cell lymphoma; we have a hematology/oncology question of the week from Dr. Emerson Chen of OHSU; and we sit down with Dr. Ali Khaki of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to discuss his recent paper critiquing TAILORx.

This week we're treating you to a recording of the Grand Rounds lecture on overdiagnosis and cancer screening that Dr. H Gilbert Welch gave at Oregon Health & Science University on October 30, 2019. Before the lecture, we take a moment to reiterate with renewed vigor our distaste for the POLO trial (first discussed in episode 1.64).

This week we answer a few questions: the first is from Patreon backer, Harry Hong, on Kaplan-Meier curves. The second is from a student at Mount Sinai Medical School who reached out with some ethical questions they had after the ASH annual meeting on the obligations and responsibilities of peer reviewers. Finally, we end the episode with an interview with Dr. Bishal Gyawali of Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada on his new paper out today in the Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network titled "Response Rates and Durations of Response for Biomarker-Based Cancer Drugs in Nonrandomized Versus Randomized Trials".

This week we return to our discussion of going after soft targets vs hard targets, but this time with a focus on how it applies to building a burgeoning career in medicine, in our segment Questions from a Medical Student with Audrey Tran. We end this week's episode with a far-reaching interview with Dr. Ellie Murray (most people know her as Epi Ellie on Twitter and as the co-host of the podcast Casual Inference) on all things epidemiology.

This week we wonder incredulously how this abstract from ASH titled "Time from diagnosis to treatment does not affect outcome in intensively treated patients with newly diagnosed acute myeloid leukemia" was selected as one of the top abstracts from the conference. In the second half of the episode we interview Dr. Sherrie Aspinall of the Veterans Administration on how to use real-world data. Her new paper is titled "Use of targeted therapies for advanced renal cell carcinoma in the Veterans Health Administration".

We're back in Plenary Session HQ! We have multiple topics for you this week. We cover the use of trastuzumab in later lines of therapy for HER2+ metastatic breast cancer, we take a listener question on Kaplan-Meier curves, and we talk a little about Patreon.

This BONUS episode is an interview with Dr. Arjun Gupta, a second-year hem/onc fellow at Johns Hopkins University, on his new paper out TODAY in JAMA Oncology titled ''Use of Bone-modifying Agents among Medicare Beneficiaries with Multiple Myeloma''.

This is the last week of pre-recorded episodes -- we'll be back next week with a fresh, hard-hitting monologue. In the meantime, we have three questions of the week for you. Two are inspired by the hematology/oncology boards and are presented by Dr. Sven Olson. Between the two, we have one from Ian Straehely that's inspired by the USMLE Step 2 CK.

Our host is still out of town, but don't worry -- we have some questions of the week to tide you over. The first is inspired by the hematology/oncology boards, presented by Dr. Sven Olson; the second is inspired by the USMLE Step 2 CK, presented by Ian Straehley; and the third is from Audrey Tran, inspired by her experiences as a med student.

This week our host is still in Australia, but we have some questions of the week saved for you! The first is inspired by the USMLE Step 2 CK, presented by Ian Straehley; the second is inspired by the hematology/oncology boards, presented by Dr. Sven Olson; and the third is from Audrey Tran, inspired by her experiences as a med student.

First up this week is Question of the Week inspired by the Hematology/Oncology boards, with Dr. Sven Olson. No monologue on current trials this week because our host is still in Australia, so we conclude the episode with an interview with Dr. Jonathan Kimmelman of McGill University on his extensive work in research ethics, studying the most important issue in cancer medicine today: the risk-benefit of clinical trials and how best to spare patients from the burdens of creating a new drug.