As cancer therapeutics extend survival for millions of patients globally, a critical infrastructure gap threatens to undermine these clinical gains. Modern oncology successfully detects acute toxicities during active treatment, yet serious long-term complications—cardiac dysfunction, pulmonary disease, secondary malignancies—often emerge years after therapy ends, frequently going unrecorded and unmanaged.
A new Nature Medicine analysis reveals that current pharmacovigilance frameworks, designed primarily for acute toxicity monitoring, are inadequately equipped to capture delayed and cumulative harms experienced across fragmented healthcare settings. The commentary underscores an urgent need for standardized, longitudinal surveillance infrastructure that integrates electronic health records, patient-reported outcomes, and real-world evidence platforms.
Without systematic innovation in toxicity tracking, cancer survivors—despite successful disease remission—face a hidden crisis of underdetected late effects. Healthcare systems must prioritize infrastructure development to ensure that clinical victories in cancer survival are not undermined by preventable long-term harm.
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