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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12026

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Tuma RS.
Business barriers slowing the pace of cancer immunotherapy research and development.
J Natl Cancer Inst 2007 Nov 7; 99:(21):1570-3 Epub 2007 Oct 30.
http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/extract/99/21/1570


Abstract:

No cancer vaccines and only a handful of antitumor immunotherapies have gained regulatory approval, despite several decades of effort. Experts think that increased knowledge about the immune system and better agents are starting to change this.

However, regulatory and intellectual property issues currently hinder development of such therapies, they say, and will continue to cause problems unless researchers have better access to agents that are still under investigation. Two recent government-sponsored meetings highlighted these concerns, and some scientific leaders are even calling for the U.S. Congress to step in.

Testing agents together in combinations, as immune-system therapies often require, is a particular problem. Companies fear that their drug applications will be slowed down if they let outside researchers use their investigational drugs in any trial that might link the agent with side effects. But that approach often leaves agents to languish for years-agents that researchers say could be successfully attacking . . .

Raising the Issues

Identifying Key Agents

Adjuvants

Examples May Illuminate the Mounting Cancer Vaccine Development Problem

Keywords:
Publication Types: News MeSH Terms: Adjuvants, Immunologic*/economics Animals Antineoplastic Agents*/adverse effects Antineoplastic Agents*/economics Biomedical Research/economics* Cancer Vaccines*/economics Drug Approval Drug Design Drug Industry Drugs, Investigational*/adverse effects Drugs, Investigational*/economics Financing, Government* Humans Immunotherapy/economics* Male National Institutes of Health (U.S.) Neoplasms/economics* Neoplasms/immunology Neoplasms/therapy* Prostatic Neoplasms/economics Prostatic Neoplasms/therapy United States United States Food and Drug Administration Substances: Adjuvants, Immunologic Antineoplastic Agents Cancer Vaccines Drugs, Investigational

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909