Monthly Update: December 2025

Hello everyone, welcome to our monthly newsletter, December 2025 edition. Please subscribe to receive monthly updates of all the exciting work happening at BG Lab.

Also, don’t forget to follow us on our X channel.

Please email brian.shkabari@queensu.ca if you need full access to any of our publications.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Graphical abstract by Laure-Anne Teuwen

1. BG published an important paper in JNCI making a case for a paradigm shift in how de-escalation treatments are tested in clinical trials – BG argues that de-escalation trials should be designed as superiority design rather than non-inferiority design. Superiority trials require fewer patients, and are more efficient and cost-effective. Dr. Gyawali thinks that this is his most important publication of 2025. He has already received encouraging emails and communications from several clinical trial groups and trialists around the world saying how they have changed the design of their upcoming deescalation trials into superiority design after reading this paper and being convinced by it! Read our news post and the full article to further understand his arguments!

Media

1. BG spoke with CBC The National and CBC News about prostate cancer screening in Canada. New research suggests prostate cancer cases have increased following changes to US screening guidelines – BG contributed his thoughts on interpreting the changing mortality rate for prostate cancer, the accuracy of screening tests, the importance of differentiating between cancers that must be removed or not, and touches on the current screening culture. Read the news article BG Lab published about this, and watch the CBC News video and article here.

2. BG was joined by Dr. Bhawna Sirohi from Balco Medical Center in Raipur, India, and Dr. Soumitra Datta from Tata Medical Center in Kolkata, India, to discuss how oncologists in LMICs integrate FDA approvals, guidelines, endpoints, magnitude of benefit and drug prices into treatment decisions. This inaugural BG Lab Webinar is now available to watch on Youtube.

3. BG published 2 new Medscape Skills Lab videos about the ESMO 2025 annual meeting. The first video, ESMO 2025: Cutting Through the Hype With Real Data and Real Math, discusses key learning lessons from the meeting. Specifically, BG advocates for greater critical analysis of the trial results that are being presented at ESMO, and the importance of understanding absolute risk reduction to grasp whether the treatment is clinically meaningful for patients. The second video, Beyond the Hype: Lessons From ESMO 2025 Oncology Trial Data, focuses on prognostic and predictive biomarkers and why BG thinks clinical decisions should be based on predictive markers rather than prognostic markers (using evidence from trials presented at ESMO 2025). He also touches on trial power, informative censoring, and utilizing combination treatments.

4. BG was quoted on a Bloomberg news article discussing how the use of inferior or substandard control arm treatments is increasing in modern cancer drug trials. We have been working in this space of inferior control arms in cancer drug trials for a long time now, as evidenced by several of our papers: Controlling the Control Arm in Metastatic Castration-Resistant Prostate Cancer Trials, Inferior Control Arms in Prostate Cancer Trials, Challenges of globalization of cancer drug trials, Should the control arms of randomized trials have an expiry date? and Inferior control arms in oncology trials in LMICs.

Talks, Presentations, and Meetings

1. Queen’s Sinclair Cancer Research Institute hosted a celebration recognizing Dr. Gyawali’s Award for Excellence in Cancer Research. At the ceremony, Dr. Gyawali delivered a talk, From Kathmandu to Kingston: My Journey of Cancer Policy Research, sharing his academic journey and research career milestones – read more here!

2. BG was part of the faculty for the On-Collab Research Methods Training Workshop in Brazil hosted by Brazil’s Ministry of Health and ASCO.

3. Both Brian Shkabari and Nicole Vorko, who had oral presentations representing BG Lab at Queen’s Oncology Research Day have been selected for the Best Research Award. Congratulations to both Brian and Nicole!

Upcoming Events

1. BG is giving a Grand Rounds for the Department of Medicine on January 8^th, 2026. He will be speaking on “The role of mentorship and social media for a modern-day physician.” Subscribe and stay tuned- we will share zoom link for online attendance closer to the date.

2. BG’s course at Queen’s University, GLPH 488 Global Oncology: Cancer Care, Policy, Research, and Education, will be starting January 5^th, 2026. This will be the fourth year BG is running this course! Brian Shkabari and Claire-Diana Gonsalves will be Teaching Assistants for this course.

3. Brian Shkabari, one of Dr. Gyawali’s research assistants, will be talking at the SCRI Cancer Care and Epidemiology Grand Rounds on January 15^th, 2026. His talk is titled “My year in BG Lab- Global Oncology through the eyes of a trainee.”

4. We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a very happy new year. BG Lab is soon publishing their 2025 Annual Report. So, stay tuned!

From the Archives

Last month, we discussed how BG started his journey of academic publication with letters to editor regarding several clinical trials that suffered from biases despite being published in high-profile journals. After that, he started publishing review articles on several clinical topics. His first full-length paper was a review on management of Opioid-Induced constipation, following which he also published reviews on treatment of locally advanced head and neck cancer, continuous versus intermittent docetaxel for prostate cancer, and cost-effective strategies for prevention of chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting.

Do you like what we do? You can support us!

The type of work that we do is often not funded by traditional funding channels. If you like our work and want to support us with a donation to our lab, please reach out directly to BG at gyawali.bishal@queensu.ca.

If you want to make a one-time contribution or regular contributions, please click here.

Please subscribe to our newsletter, X account, Youtube channel, and spread the word.

Thank you for reading and stay tuned for next month’s update!