Where To Start Finding More Resources For Fighting Cancer

Dr. Love is undoubtedly right, but where do you start to find more resources for cancer? Maybe the place to look is the cost of the medications for cancer.

My own mother had had breast cancer, stage IV breast cancer, lesions in skull and arms found in 1984, in fact, for 11 years when a new medication called Taxol was discovered in 1995. At that time, making this yew tree extract required cutting down literal groves of yew trees. (It's synthesized in a laboratory now.) Every single injection of the drug cost approximately $110,000 (about $240,000 in 2013-dollars), and she needed an injection every week. It helped a little, but her HMO put up quite a fuss about the cost. A wealthy friend intervened, but that help only lasted so long. Just six days after her oncologist told her "you are not worth the cost of more treatment," she gave up and died.

Cancer Therapies, Although Much Less Expensive Than They Used to Be, Still Very Costly

Similar stories exist today, even though medication costs are much, much lower. A year's treatment with Avastin costs $100,000. A year's treatment with Gleevec also costs $100,000. Treatment with protein-bound paclitaxel, which is the more modern version of a drug given to m my mother, costs $96,000 per year. 

Obviously there would be a lot more resources for fighting cancer if cancer treatments cost less--or if they worked in smaller doses. Perhaps that is the kind of research that a rainbow coalition of cancer concerns might seek to fund.

The Nature of Cancer Research Leads to Prescription of High Doses of Expensive Drugs

Cancer drugs aren't usually tested on people who have any other options. It would be considered unethical to deprive someone of a drug with known benefits, so new medications are typically tested on people in the later stages of the disease.

A research company is not going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a clinical trial if it believes the test drug would be found to "fail" because it was not administered in a large enough dose. Therefore, tests of new cancer drugs involve high doses of potent drugs in the hope they get statistically significant results. Higher doses of drugs, of course, cost more, and cause more side effects.

Read More: Seven Cancer Treatment Practices That May Be Discontinued

Lower doses of medications wouldn't necessarily cost less, at least not at first, because pharmaceutical companies still seek to recover the costs of running clinical trials on drugs that work as well as drugs that don't. But research to determine the smallest effective dose in patients at earlier stages of cancer would seem to be the way to save money on pharmaceuticals, at least in the long run, and to avoid side effects from treatment.

Of course, forming a rainbow coalition to find drugs that work for multiple kinds of cancer, in both women and men, requires a lot of organizers to check their egos at the door. It also threatens the high salaries of the CEO's of some fund raising organizations. But getting beyond a pattern of supporting research for cancer by organ of origin may be exactly what is needed to finally start winning the war on cancer.