The National Cancer Institute plans to review its multimillion-dollar PR account handled by Ogilvy PR for the past five years.
Ogilvy's contract, won in in 2008, expired last fall but projects resulting from that work have continued through this month. The NIC, part of the National Institutes of Health, is planning to award Ogilvy/Washington a four-month bridge contract through January 2015 to give it time to review the account.
The PR work covers a swath of communications duties like media relations and public affairs support, technical writing and research, among other tasks.
Last year, two committees in the US House of Representatives said they would probe PR spending at the NCI's office of communications after a critical article in the journal Nature questioned that unit's $45M budget.
Lo Isidro, senior director at Real Chemistry with more than a decade of strategic communications and PA experience, has joined Narrative Strategies.
Nelson Fernandez, former North American chair of APCO Worldwide and managing director of Burson-Marsteller, has joined Volunteers in Medicine Berkshires as director of communications and PA.
Lilit Bargar, who was most recently an EVP in the healthcare practice at Weber Shandwick, comes on board at GCI Health as EVP, corporate practice lead.
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