Monthly Update: January 2026

Hello everyone, welcome to our monthly newsletter, January 2026 edition. We have started 2026 with some exciting notes.

First, we have released our first-ever Annual Report for 2025. If you haven’t read it yet, we strongly encourage you to! The Annual Report highlights our notable achievements from 2025 and gives you a peek into what we are planning for 2026. You can download it here.

Second, we have formally launched training and fellowship opportunities with BG Lab. If you are interested, you can read more here about training opportunities with us.

Which brings us to the first major announcement of 2026!

Exciting Announcement

She is already involved in 2 cool projects with our team and is looking forward to an educational and highly productive year of fellowship with us. Read our news post  to learn more about our new fellow! Read more about the training opportunities with BG Lab here.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

In January, we did not have any peer-reviewed publications that was led by BG Lab. However, we were pleased to collaborate with colleagues globally on some important publications as follows:

1. BG collaborated on a paper published in BMJ Oncology evaluating health system matrices (e.g. health spending as a percent of GDP, physicians per 1000 population, availability of cervical cancer screening) and their association with mortality to incidence ratios for cervical cancer for 121 countries across the world. These findings can inform initiatives working to improve cervical cancer care to ultimately improve outcomes for patients and reduce global inequities in these outcomes.

2. BG was a co-author on an important health policy paper published in The Lancet Global Health advocating for intersectionality-informed agenda in addressing cancer disparities in South Asia through equitable financing and employment, clinical training designed to include bias mitigation and cultural competence, and focusing on research that centers on intersectional risks.

3. BG collaborated on a third paper published in blood global hematology investigating the burden, distribution, and projections of hematologic cancers in South Asia. Their findings can improve patient outcomes by informing cancer planning and system improvement that is equity centered.

Remarkably, all 3 of these papers were led by Edward Christopher Dee and his team, many kudos to him for such meaningful publications, which we are happy to support.

Media

BG published a column on Medscape highlighting the challenges and concerns with non-inferiority design trials in oncology, even for de-escalation strategies. He argues that a superiority design is far better and more efficient for this purpose. Having said that, he argues that non-inferiority design still has a place in oncology- for RCTs of me-too drugs. Read here for more detailed discussion.

Talks, Presentations, and Meetings

1. We started our fourth year of the GLPH 488 course on Global Oncology and Cancer Policy with 80 motivated students from Queen’s University. This is one of the most popular elective courses in the university, with our RAs Claire Diana-Gonsalves and Brain Shkabari as the Teaching Assistants. Our guest speakers in January included Dr. Lorenzo Moja from World Health Organization, and Dr. Thiwanka Wijeratne.

2. BG gave a talk on The Role of Social Media in Building an Academic Career in Medicine for the Queen’s Medicine Grand Rounds on January 8^th.

3. Brian Shkabari presented at the Cancer Care and Epidemiology Seminar on January 25^th about his year with BG lab – global oncology through the eyes of a trainee.

4. Our co-investigator Laure-Anne Teuwen debated at the Breast Cancer Debate and Highlights of the Year 2025 in Brussels. She also later presented in Antwerp at the Post-San Antonio Highlight meeting.

Upcoming Events

1. On Feb 3, BG is speaking with the REaCT clinical trials team in Ottawa about designing of de-escalation strategy trials.

2. On Feb 7, Laure-Anne is going to talk about critical appraisal of a clinical trial using the CSO RCT checklist at the Belgian Young Oncology Community session at the Annual Belgian Society for Medical Oncology Meeting 2026.

From the Archives

BG’s first single-author paper was a commentary in JCO Global Oncology called “me-too”. This commentary was his first attempt towards advocating for more global equity in access to cancer medicines and laid the foundation for the Cancer Groundshot philosophy that later crystallized.

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.

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