Cancer Cures a Generation Away? Current Drugs Too Expensive for Benefits

March 19, 2007

A Moving Target

March 13, 2007

(The New York Times News Service) -- The drug had been heralded as a

potential " cure " for cancer, but by the time Avastin won federal

approval for treatment of advanced lung cancer last fall, the drug's

maker made only this modest claim: Desperately ill patients will

typically live two months more than if they hadn't taken it.

The much-anticipated " smart, " or targeted, cancer treatments are

joining the war on cancer -- four were approved last year alone --

but scientists are discovering that cancer is a tougher foe than

they realized even a few years ago when stunning results in mice

raised expectations sky high.

At least a dozen targeted drugs like Avastin, designed to attack

tumors' molecular weaknesses without harming the patient, have been

approved since 1998, but only three are dramatic improvements over

conventional treatment, and most measure their success in extra

weeks or months of life for people with advanced cancer.

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" Unless we want to bankrupt future generations, " Hillner wrote

recently in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, " cost-effectiveness

assessments will have an increasing role in determining ... how we

spend or allocate our precious healthcare dollars. "

Schnipper worries that if cost issues aren't addressed now, cancer

patients of the future may be divided into " haves " and " have-nots. "

Currently, patients who don't get targeted therapies may miss out on

a few months of life, but in the years to come, he said, the life-

saving benefits will grow.

" I'm very bullish, not on the next year or two, but I think in my

children's lifetime this disease will be a skeleton of what it used

to be, " he said, as long as patients can get targeted therapies to

keep the disease in check.

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