Why Haven't We Cured Cancer?

Each day brings more news about promising discoveries about cancer. Most of these discoveries will never result in a cure. Why? Our society has been great at funding early scientific discoveries. We have failed to get the job done and make investments to develop many promising discoveries into lifesaving medicines.

If we want to cure cancer, we must pay for it.”

Dr. Andrew Lo, PhD, MIT, Laboratory for Financial Engineering, Sloan School of Management

Watch Dr. Andrew Lo's Ted Talk to find out why more cures don't get to patients.

We can do better in financing clinical development.

The CanceRx financing model was developed by Dr. Andrew Lo and the Nobel Laureate faculty at MIT’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering. This approach uses bonds to fund long-term, uninterrupted support for clinical development and human trials.

Thanks to significant NIH support, we do well at basic scientific discoveries for cancer cures. However, in the next steps for patients —when research moves to testing safety and efficacy in humans — the pipeline for new cancer treatments falls apart.

Discovery

Basic and Pre-clinical Research – The US federal government, followed by some philanthropy, funds basic lab research to discover possible new cancer cures. Basic science in cancer research is moving rapidly but has nowhere else to go in the lengthy and costly pathway to patients.

Translation

Phase I-II Clinical Development – To be approved as a new cancer treatment, discoveries first must be tested in people. Many new cures never get this far – due to shortfalls of private venture capital.

Scale up

Phase III-IV Trials & Regulatory Approval – Big-Pharma companies often prefer to buy new cancer drugs in later phases. They put the new treatments into large-scale clinical trials to finish proving they are better. Then comes expensive, protracted FDA approval, which can take up to three or more years for patient treatments.