Setbacks in the War on Cancer
How many new drugs, Dr. Lajos Pusztai asks, were approved for breast cancer treatment in the past decade? His answer: seven. None was much different from drugs already on the market.
Yet in the same decade, he said, there were 8,000 publications in medical and scientific journals on breast cancer and more than 3,000 clinical trials at a cost of over $1 billion. “What came out of this is seven ‘me too’ drugs,” Dr. Pusztai said.
See NYT article on “me too” drugs and the scientific struggle to find a cure for cancer.
Depressing post.
I read this article and it was depressing. This is partly the reason why cancer drugs are so expensive.
I think we are losing the war, not winning the war.
A little perspective seems to be in order here. For something as poorly understood as cancer, rapid progress just isn’t going to happen. Expecting progress in a decade is a quite a bit out of line with the way things have worked in the past.
Progress in science is typically based on decades or centuries of work. Penicillin was discovered in 1896 and rediscovered in 1928. In 1939 its ability to kill bacteria was demonstrated. It wasn’t until 1944 that Pfizer managed to mass-produce penicillin.
Its development was rapid because it treated a mortal disease, its effects were easy to observe, and people didn’t worry about side effects, which can kill, in about 1 in 5000 people.
Taxol was showed activity against human cancer cells in 1962. Its structure was reported in 1971. It was used in clinical trials against various forms of cancer in the 1980s. In 1991 Bristol-Meyers started developing a drug. It wasn’t until 1995 that the stuff could be synthetically synthesized.
So, for two decades of its three decade development, there was no progress.
Can you really call it a “war” when cancer doesn’t know that we’re trying to get rid of it?
I would think that some of our understanding of cancer has probably improved, but like Linda says, science is characterized by long periods of relentless work and brief spurts of discovery. We should hope for the best, but expect a long, slow, journey.