After being diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, the high school football coach and counselor started chemotherapy in 2023, but he had to stop abruptly when the drug he received, cisplatin, became harder to find as part of a nationwide shortage of chemotherapy drugs. “I just keep wondering, ‘What if we had gotten the cisplatin? Could it have slowed his cancer down? she tells TODAY.com. “Would he have been able to coach even more? Would he have been stronger? Would he have felt better? ...
But shortages of cancer therapeutics are not new. “What we’re experiencing right now is really the latest of multiple waves of shortages that have really gone back a decade,” Mark Fleury, Ph.D., who works in policy development and emerging science at the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, tells TODAY.com. “We have many drugs that have never really left shortage and some that cycle in and cycle back out .