American Enterprise Institute resident fellow, former FDA official, and friend of ACSH Dr. Scott Gottlieb evaluates the progress made in cancer treatment in today's Wall Street Journal. Gottlieb highlights the results of studies of two experimental drugs presented at this year s annual American Society of Oncology meeting in Chicago. The drugs, Ipilimumab and Crizotinib, are used treat melanoma and drug-resistant lung cancer, and Gottleib says they have produced "stunning results."
But ACSH's Gilbert Ross is more cautious, saying that the benefits of the drugs "are only incremental."
Dr. Gottlieb also worries that obstacles to collaboration between pharmaceutical companies and academic medical centers will hurt cancer research:
Like all fragile ecosystems, the critical path for translating basic scientific principles into effective medicines is susceptible to outside forces. Lately, these are policies that shrink the incentives that drive the capital investment needed to underwrite these long and risky endeavors, or growing regulation by the Food and Drug Administration that makes it harder to get treatments to market. Most ominous, the journey from lab to treatment is at risk from activists' and regulators' growing suspicion of the collaboration between the academic researchers who uncover basic science and the drug industry that is able to design and manufacture medicines.