There are key points to this story about an important new report from the Institute of Medicine(IOM), an independent arm of the National Academy of Sciences, which affect you or someone you care about.

This report matters to you.

The IOM did not say it this way, but I am fairly confident it is what they would say if they didn’t have to write in formal report-type language.

• The nation’s cancer brain trust is endangered—the people who do clinical trials on drugs  which do not interest drug companies. That is a lot of drugs whose profit potential is apparent to them. They are businesses. That is their right. That is, not right for finding the best treatment for cancer patients. This is a job which government should do.
• Waste and inefficiency are the causes of 40% of late-stage trials to be ended before completion. Late-stage trials are where the real clinical advances are found—the culmination of all of the rat-mice studies, after the experimental period. This is exactly when they should not have to give up.
• Waste and inefficiency here is not caused by greed or stupidity, as is often the case when waste and inefficiency pose a problem. There is not enough money to go around. The design process for trials is very cumbersome. There are not enough doctors to complete this research.
• Cancer patients lose. The nation loses the talents of the cancer patients who do not survive. Families lose people they love.
• As this Business Week story says, about 560,000—more than a half-million—people die in America each year. It is second only to heart disease in the leading causes of death list.

Business Week

“The U.S. government’s cancer research network is “approaching a state of crisis” as waste and inefficiency cause 40 percent of late-stage trials it funds to be abandoned before completion, a report found.

“The government-funded National Cancer Institute’s clinical trials group isn’t able to effectively study the benefits of new and current treatments, according to the analysis by the Institute of Medicine. Among the report’s recommendations is increasing funding for cancer studies, simplifying the process of designing trials, and offering incentives for doctors to do such research. (Emphasis added)

“The NCI’s network of cancer centers and doctors tests cancer treatments on 25,000 patients a year, with an annual budget of about $145 million, the report said. Cancer kills about 560,000 people in the U.S. each year, the second-biggest cause of death behind heart disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.”

…”The trial network, called the Clinical Trials Cooperative Group Program, is comprised of doctors at universities and community cancer centers who develop clinical trials and enroll patients in those studies. Its work fills a research gap by focusing on efforts not typically undertaken by drug companies, such as comparing rival treatments or testing combinations of experimental therapies.” (Emphasis added)

Source: Business Week, April 15, 2010