Fig. 1 | The reopening of “CANCER MOONSHOT”: From cancer oppression to conquer cancer . It’s believed that with the help of iRT-ABCDEFG program which includes the Goal of combating cancer in the globe, people will get the final victory by development of fresh preventive strategies, new diagnostic tools, and novel therapies of precise medicine.
During the pandemic or post-Covid-19 era, patients with active cancer and in cancer survivors have a worse outcome due to persistent multi-organ viral attacks or an abnormal immune response14. There are both more adverse cardiac outcomes and significantly increased cardiac biomarkers as well as a high in-hospital mortality in Covid-19 patients with cancer15 due to mainly driven by gender, advancing age, smoking, socioeconomic deprivation, and other comorbidities16,17, such as cardiovascular disease (CVD), diabetes. And these risk factors are more strongly associated with infection death. Covid-19 cases with both cancer and established CVD and risk factors are at the highest risk for serious complications, including death, thus, these patients need to be screened by both cardiac biomarkers and a more focused cardiovascular imaging approach so as to minimize the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection18. In fact, Covid-19 is a vital risk factor for acute myocardial infarction and ischaemic stroke in the era of Covid-1919.
Normalized understanding, lung cancer is still the leading cause of cancer death in the US (approximately 350 deaths per day)6, however, breast cancer surpassed lung cancer as the leading cause of cancer death among Black women in 201920, and the number of cancer survivors continues to increase mainly due to improvement and advances in early screening, detection, and targeted treatment6,21. During the pandemic and post-Covid-19 era, there are rising needs for the rapid expansion of telemedicine platforms14 for cancer cases. In a word, patients with cancer need the best possible care during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A study showed that endotheliopathy presented in Covid-19 is associated with critical illness and death22. Single-cell atlases revealed the biological effect of severe SARS-CoV-2 infection and new cellular targets for treatments23. Genome-wide CRISPR Screens also show potential therapeutic targets and small-molecule antagonists may inhibit SARS-CoV-2 infection24. These studies on the mechanisms and novel treatments will help to combat Covid-19 for improvement of cancer outcomes. And these new strategies will help to further improve quality of life (QOL) and outcomes in cancer patients with Covid-19 in the globe.