Potential Cures Kept from Us

Hey all you awesome Semi-Colons!

This is the latest article from a medical writer/researcher who raises an important issue of how drugs get patented and what is kept from US-- the ones who need them.

At the end he talks about melatonin which is something that I still take every night that was prescribed to me for shrinking tumors. You can get it anywhere thankfully.

peace, emily

For the first time, I have had an op-ed piece published in the New York Times. It appeared in last Sunday's Times (April 1st 2007) and can be viewed online at:

http://forums.pearljam.com/showthread.php?t=239737

I was asked to write this article as part of an entire page devoted to cancer. Unlike so much of what you read about cancer in the mainstream media, the tone of the page was rather critical of current directions.

Other contributors included Susan Love, MD, the well-known surgeon and author on breast cancer; Harold Varmus, MD, Nobel laureate, former director of the National Institutes of Health, and current president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; and Shannon Brownlee, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

I was honored that the Times asked me to join this distinguished group and submit an editorial comment. I chose to write about the issue of drug patentability and how that affects the pace of discovery and therapeutic progress in cancer. This is a topic I first wrote about in the 1970s, and so I was glad to have an opportunity to revisit the subject, and to reach the New York Times' vast and influential audience.

The Times is the largest metropolitan newspaper in the US, with a Sunday circulation of 1.6 million. In addition, its Web site receives 11.6 million visitors per month and ranks as the number one newspaper site. Needless to say, the influence of America's "newspaper of record" goes beyond what the sheer numbers say. In a sense, it defines the boundaries of a debate. Thus, for the Times to include my critical point of view on the foundering war on cancer is an indication that times have changed, and that opinion makers are willing to take a more searching look at where we are going in pursuit of victory over cancer.

In case you have difficulty accessing the article online, here is what I wrote:

We could make faster progress against cancer by changing the way drugs are developed. In the current system, if a promising compound can't be patented, it is highly unlikely ever to make it to market - no matter how well it performs in the laboratory. The development of new cancer drugs is crippled as a result.

The reason for this problem is that bringing a new drug to market is extremely expensive. In 2001, the estimated cost was $802 million; today it is approximately $1 billion. To ensure a healthy return on such staggering investments, drug companies seek to formulate new drugs in a way that guarantees watertight patents. In the meantime, cancer patients miss out on treatments that may be highly effective and less expensive to boot. In 2004, Johns Hopkins researchers discovered that an off-the-shelf compound called 3-bromopyruvate could arrest the growth of liver cancer in rats. The results were dramatic; moreover, the investigators estimated that the cost to treat patients would be around 70 cents per day. Yet, three years later, no major drug company has shown interest in developing this drug for human use.

Early this year, another readily available industrial chemical, dichloroacetate, was found by researchers at the University of Alberta to shrink tumors in laboratory animals by up to 75 percent. However, as a university news release explained, dichloroacetate is not patentable, and the lead researcher is concerned that it may be difficult to find funding from private investors to test the chemical. So the university is soliciting public donations to finance a clinical trial.

The hormone melatonin, sold as an inexpensive food supplement in the United States, has repeatedly been shown to slow the growth of various cancers when used in conjunction with conventional treatments. Paolo Lissoni, an Italian oncologist, helped write more than 100 articles about this hormone and conducted numerous clinical trials. But when I visited him at his hospital in Monza in 2003, he was in deep despair over the pharmaceutical industry's total lack of interest in his treatment approach. He has published nothing on the topic since then.

Potential anticancer drugs should be judged on their scientific merit, not on their patentability. One solution might be for the government to enlarge the Food and Drug Administration's "orphan drug" program, which subsidizes the development of drugs for rare diseases. The definition of orphan drug could be expanded to include unpatentable agents that are scorned as unprofitable by pharmaceutical companies.

We need to foster a research and development environment in which anticancer activity is the main criterion for new drug development.





--Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D.