Cancer Treatment Prioritized Over Prevention? Money Found to Encourage Trend

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Cancer foundations and cancer research programs operate with the help millions of dollars of funding. However, a new research found out that the priorities and economics behind the handling of these cancer funds may actually be "distorted."

The research, published in the American Economic Review, suggested that cancer research projects are more inclined to pour efforts and resources in finding a cure for the disease when devising better and effective ways to prevent it in its early stages should've been the priority.

The analysis by experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago pointed out that most cancer programs deal with the patent system devised by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The government agency not only approves the drugs, it also approves cancer clinical trials.

The study authors, Heidi Williams, Eric Budish and Benjamin Roin, took note of the "commercialization lag" in this system or the time it takes for a cancer program to receive a patent and an FDA approval. Evidently, the fault in the system seemingly favors the development of cancer treatments that provide the patients smaller chances of survival. However, these drugs are approved faster because drug companies aim to complete studies before their patent with the FDA expires. Proving that a treatment is safe and effective takes time and, as the clock ticks, so do the company's profit margins.

Thus, what is allegedly a common trend among cancer research programs and drug companies is to put more focus on late-stage cancer because that's where the money is. Clinical trials progress more quickly in this case because the patients' conditions are more aggressive and easier to detect. It's not the same case for early-stage cancer.

"R & D on cancer prevention and treatment of early-stage cancer is very socially valuable," stated the study authors in an exclusive email to The New York Times. "Yet our work shows that society provides private firms - perhaps inadvertently - with surprisingly few incentives to conduct this kind of research." This so-called lag that researchers noted resulted in "890,000 lost life-years" solely in 2003.

To facilitate better approvals for cancer treatments, the study authors suggested the FDA consider "surrogate endpoints," where improved health of the patient is more evident apart from survival rate. Such is the case of a leukemia study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, which measured bone marrow characteristics and white blood cell counts of patients as the surrogate endpoints. It has shorten FDA approval time for leukemia treatments.

The study also suggested the extension of the patent period to do away with the commercialization lag and to focus on the priority -- developing preventive medicine for cancer.