America declared war on cancer 100 years ago. Today’s regulatory hurdles will not help us win

At the end of 2015, my brother Michael Ratner was brought to the hospital with feelings of nausea. Eventually, he was taken to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to be treated for a brain tumor. He was 71 years old and one of the most famous human rights lawyers in the world. Despite her prominence, and the beauty of Sloan Kettering, on May 11, 2016 she was dead.

My brother’s tragic end points to everything we are doing wrong with cancer. When President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer on Dec. 23, 1971, he hoped that the cancer would be cured within five years. More than half a century later, we are no closer to winning that battle.

We spend 200 billion dollars every year to treat cancer and yet it is still the second leading cause of death in the US, killing more than 600,000 Americans annually. The time has come for us to take a closer look at our approach to dealing with this dreaded disease. Although Nixon’s battle has not been won, we have learned a great deal about cancer in the past 50 years, including the fact that early detection is the single best thing we can do to reduce cancer deaths. Treatment is definitely needed, and the awesome oncologists at Sloan Kettering and other leading cancer centers are doing a great job, but they are fighting an uphill battle against cancer that is caught too late in the game.

There are already effective tests that catch cancer early, including well-known tests such as low-dose (and cheap) CT scans for lung cancer, mammograms for breast cancer, Pap smears for cervical cancer, PSA blood tests for prostate cancer. , and colonoscopies for colon cancer. Unfortunately, these tests are not enough. About 70 percent of cancer deaths are from cancers that lack currently recommended screening.

We need to participate in the emergence of a new generation of advanced technologies that use genetic sequencing and machine learning to aid in early detection and make the fight against cancer even more effective. This includes multi-cancer tests (MCEDs), some of which are now available to patients and doctors and are diagnosing cancer and saving lives. More tests are expected to be available soon. This test can detect many types of cancer and catch it when it’s early enough to do something about it. These tests look for pieces of DNA in the blood to check for cancer, and if it is found, find the source so it can be treated and treated. Some promising tests have a false positive rate of less than 1 percent.

As promising as these technologies are, their adoption process takes longer than it sounds. Major regulatory hurdles stand in the way. Concerns about the cost of new tests and questions about whether early detection saves lives are sadly hampering progress in the effort to save lives. The Food and Drug Administration is studying MCEDs and authorizing more trials but may need to wait for long-term studies that could follow patients for decades, before the green light is widely used. And antitrust regulators, in a move that appears to be in direct opposition to President Biden’s widely publicized Cancer Moonshot agenda, are questioning a direct merger that could accelerate the adoption of such a test.

Small companies often need the resources of large companies to increase market access and manage government regulatory requests. In one case, the involvement of the Federal Trade Commission scared away a large investor, which could delay an acquisition by depriving a small founder of the resources needed by a large player.

We are on the cusp of an exciting new technology that will help us win the war our government declared 50 years ago. Unfortunately, this is the very government that may be hindering progress in that fight at a time when it is most needed.

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