Dr Amit Kulkarni speaks to ecancer about the global health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Due to a current lack of data on how the pandemic is impacting cancer patients, he explains that a multi-institutional consortium is studying potential short and long term impacts on cancer care on both an individual and societal level.

Dr Kulkarni says using this approach they can rapidly learn and disseminate information to combat disruption of care. This will also allow them to better understand how COVID-19 is impacting clinical research and trials.

He goes into detail of the design of the study and how they hope to apply their findings, concluding by discussing the global outlook in the near future.