Making money off cancer drug trials

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Hi, it's in Bob in New York. I've been spending much of this year digging into cancer capitalism and have new reporting I want to highlight. But first ...  Today's must-reads Gene editing superstars team up to cut the costs of curing rare diseases. Biotech and pharma company share offerings jumped in the fourth quarter. Kenvue is facing an FDA petition to remove Benadryl's active ingredient. Test money Clinical trials to test new cancer drugs can't happen without volunteers willing to participate. Some small clinics have discovered that this can be a lucrative business, as companies will sometimes pay the clinics $250,000 or more for each patient they enroll in major oncology trials. When I started reporting on costly cancer drugs that didn't save lives earlier this year, I heard from critics of the system that companies could sometimes make their compounds look good through the clever trial designs — essentially by limiting the therapies allowed in the control group. Prostate cancer was mentioned as an arena where this was happening. That led to a collaboration over the burgeoning cancer clinical trial industry with my colleague Caleb Melby. As Melby and I report in this Big Take, Luke Nordquist, who runs the XCancer clinic in Omaha, Nebraska, has worked on more than 200 trials over 15 years. It's helped him sponsor XCancer Motorsports, a car racing team helmed by his son, and donate to a residential complex for cancer patients near a hospital in Tanzania. The flood of money has effectively created incentives for doctors to sign up patients for unproven treatments and at times bent traditional research norms. Recently, some studies have compared new treatments to existing options that are inferior or exclude some of the most potent available medicines, according to Ian Tannock, a University of Toronto emeritus professor who pioneered new chemotherapy drugs in prostate cancer. This is known as a "straw man" control group. Many people think that each new experimental drug must be better than the last, but fewer than half of the cancer drugs approved since 2000 have been proven to prolong people's lives, a Bloomberg analysis found. Some studies show that in solid tumors the average cancer trial adds only a few weeks to patients' lives, often with serious side effects. One critic of flawed cancer trials was UC San Francisco hematologist-oncologist, Vinay Prasad, who's now the chief medical and scientific officer at the Food and Drug Administration. In his 2020 book, Malignant: How Bad Policy and Bad Evidence Harm People with Cancer, research papers and YouTube videos, he's sharply criticized some drug trials as "absolutely worthless." It's unclear whether Prasad will continue to speak out against questionable drug trial procedures in his current role. Certainly, disclosure rules haven't kept pace with the new financial realities of clinical testing. But there's a lot of money at stake: It's estimated that drug companies spend $80 billion a year on clinical trials in oncology. — Robert Langreth What we're reading Almost one-quarter of Americans say health care is in crisis, the Washington Post reports from a new Gallup poll. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants people to eat saturated fats, but reducing their consumption can provide health benefits, the Wall Street Journal reports. "An Arm and a Leg" talks Americans through how to pick health insurance right now. KFF has the podcast and a transcript. Contact Prognosis Health questions? Have a tip that we should investigate? Contact us at AskPrognosis@bloomberg.net. Follow us You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Prognosis newsletter. If a friend forwarded you this message, sign up here to get it in your inbox. Unsubscribe Bloomberg.com Contact Us Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington Avenue New York, NY 10022 |