Has the paper always been so full of cancer articles, or is it I'm just finding them more? Wish my eyes focused more on Albany and Red Sox stories like they used to.
At any rate, interesting story in today's Times about pharmaceutical companies getting more heavily into cancer drugs as their profits from other areas shrink.
This is of course a good-news and bad-news story. It's certainly good news that the companies are investing in research that could lead to new drugs to fight cancer. Patients get the benefits and the companies get rich. That's the American way.
On the other side, though, seems like the drugs developed so far are very expensive and don't advance the cause that much.
For example, the article cited a new pancreatic-cancer drug, Tarceva, which costs $3,500 a month and lengthened the average patient's life by only 12 days. Not exactly a home run.
The article sets out an impressive list of barriers to developing new drugs, the biggest seeming to be the almost infinite variety of cancers that afflict people. Trying to find drugs effective against many or most of them has proven to be difficult indeed.
But AIDS and other diseases that looked resistant to drugs for a long time have yielded in the end to drug therapy. American money and research seems like a promising way to go and has to give people like me hope.
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