The drugmakers are widely attacked, occasionally for good
cause--such as when they spend millions of dollars promoting
Obamacare. But when they are good, they are very
good. Like looking for cancer cures.
Writes Andrew Pollack in the New York Times:
Virtually every large pharmaceutical company seems to have
discovered cancer, and a substantial portion of the smaller
biotechnology companies are focused on it as well. Together,
the companies are pouring billions of dollars into developing
cancer drugs.
Two industry trends are driving the push. Recent scientific
discoveries have suggested new targets for cancer drug
researchers to attack. And as drug companies see profits
beginning to wane from mainstays like Lipitor, the high prices
that cancer drugs can command have become an irresistible lure.
About 860 cancer drugs are being tested in clinical trials,
according to the pharmaceutical industry's main trade group.
That is more than twice the number of experimental drugs for
heart disease and stroke combined, nearly twice as many as for
AIDS
and all other
infectious diseases combined, and nearly twice as many as
for
Alzheimer's and all other neurological diseases combined.
But for all the industry's spending and effort, only a trickle
of new cancer drugs make it to market. Last year there were
two, and this year there has been only one.
And even some of those drugs offer only a few months at most of
extra life or tumor
stabilization despite prices that often reach thousands of
dollars a month. The drug Tarceva,
which costs about $3,500 a month, was approved as a treatment
for
pancreatic cancer because it improved survival by 12 days.
The battle to treat cancer has become, as a commentary in a
leading journal put it, a "grinding war of the trenches."
Why? Experts say the same factors that attract drug companies
to the cancer business help explain the slow progress.
Finding new drugs is expensive. The cost is not primarily
that of production, but of discovery--including the expense of
all the many dry holes drilled along the way. We all
would prefer to pay less for drugs, but government price controls
under whatever guise risk killing the golden goose, slowing the
supply of new products which just might be the medicine which
save our life, or that of a relative or friend.
