Is There a Cure for Cancer Sitting at the Back of the Medicine Cabinet Already?
27th April 2015
So, how come a generic drug that costs pennies compared to a new targeted agent that costs thousands of pounds isn’t in clinical use? The data is there, the drugs are there and certainly the patients are there. At this point we begin to stray from medicine and into the arena of intellectual property and incentives.
There is a huge regulatory burden and massive costs involved in running the largest Phase III trials normally required to convince doctors to change medical practice. What’s more, drugs need to be licensed for new uses and this also incurs costs. Who pays for all this?
With no guarantee of a return on investment, we’re left with a class of drugs that has huge potential but we don’t have the incentives in place to see the science confirmed and the drugs moved into clinical use after that confirmation.
And God help you, as a private citizen, attempting to do this on your own — they can’t put you in jail for using it but they can sure as shit put the people who make it and the people who sell it to you in jail (Hell, War On Drugs!).