Why Preventing Cancer Is Not the Priority in Drug Development
From the article:
Most people would agree that it would be better to prevent cancer, if we could, than to treat it once it developed. Yet economic incentives encourage researchers to focus on treatment rather than prevention.
The way the patent system interacts with the Food and Drug Administration’s drug approval process skews what kinds of cancer clinical trials are run. There’s more money to be made investing in drugs that will extend cancer patients’ lives by a few months than in drugs that would prevent cancer in the first place.
That’s one of the findings from the work of Heidi Williams, an M.I.T. economics professor and recent MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant winner, who studied the problem along with Eric Budish, a University of Chicago economics professor, and Ben Roin, assistant professor of technological innovation, entrepreneurship and strategic management at M.I.T. [...]
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bioethics biotechnology fda health law policy innovation pharmaceuticals regulation