More profit than progress in cancer research

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24930000/
More profit than progress in cancer research
[Excerpt]
With so many expensive drugs available, why aren't we doing better?
An NBC Nightly News special series

NBC News
updated 6:48 p.m. ET June 10, 2008

CHICAGO — As I do every year at this time, I have been covering the annual
meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the world’s biggest
gathering of cancer specialists. At least 33,000 medical professionals
registered for this year’s meeting. The number of attendees has been
climbing yearly for decades, an indication of the enormous growth of the
cancer treatment industry.

In the massive commercial exhibits area, drug companies vie to attract
attention for their treatments and diagnostics. Many of those products
sell for tens of thousands of dollars a year for each patient and bring in
billions of dollars for their manufacturers.

During conference session breaks the seemingly endless hallways of
Chicago’s monstrous McCormick Place Convention Center become gorged with
doctors walking at slightly crooked angles. The gait results from each
carrying a conference bag filled with the huge printed programs, books of
study abstracts, as well as the drug company handouts they accumulate.
Those doctors, considered "thought leaders" whose prescribing patterns
influence other doctors, score invitations to drug company parties at some
of the cities most elegant restaurants and clubs.

In the midst of this annual frenzy, it's appropriate to ask a question
that has become a cliché of medical journalism: Are we winning the war on
cancer?

The inquiry has been recurring since December 23, 1971 when President
Nixon signed into law the National Cancer Act, called the "War on Cancer"
by those who backed it in Congress and the White House. At the signing
Nixon declared, "I hope in the years ahead we will look back on this
action today as the most significant action taken during my
Administration."

The Act made the National Cancer Institute separate from the rest of the
National Institutes of Health, with the NCI director reporting to the
President. And it vastly increased funding for the NCI to $230 million
that year. Today, the NCI’s annual budget is about $5 billion.

Difficult to eliminate
There is of course no simple answer to the question of progress against
cancer. The word cancer applies to some 200 diseases characterized by
uncontrolled cell growth. Today, a diagnosis of cancer is not the
automatic death sentence that many saw it to be at the time of Nixon’s
signing. Some 10 million Americans, in fact, are living with cancer.

In addition, the death rates from lung cancer — the biggest killer of all
— have been dropping in men and have leveled off in women. That is due
almost entirely to changes in smoking patterns that occurred decades ago.

The treatments that the lung cancer specialists here apply have little
effect. In fact, one of the news announcements from this conference was
that the drug Erbitux, which sells for about $17,000 a month, prolonged
survival in lung cancer patients by an average of one month.

There have been small, but steady declines in other major killer cancers
such as breast, colon, and prostate. Those have to do with better methods
of early detection and treatment.

But when looking at the overall picture there has been shockingly little
progress. In the United States between 1950 and 2005 (the last year for
which data are available) the death rate from cancer declined by 5
percent, an amount that is mostly due to the decline in cigarette smoking.
By contrast the death rate from heart disease fell in the same period by
64 percent!

As the population ages, more people will die of both cancer and heart
disease so these figures from the American Cancer Society are adjusted to
account for the aging population.

If so many more doctors are treating cancer with so many more expensive
drugs why are they not doing better?

Basic research has revealed how similar cancer cells are to normal cells.
That similarity makes it enormously difficult to eliminate cancer without
destroying normal tissue....see rest of on web page