How to save American lives
In what is a testament to the brilliance of American science — and what ought to be a flashing warning to a federal government poised to slash research funding — a panel of experts advising the Food and Drug Administration just okayed a breakthrough cancer therapy. If and when the full FDA approves the treatment this fall, as expected, doctors treating children and young adults with an advanced form of leukemia will gain a powerful new weapon against the deadly disease.
What’s intensely exciting, and for now incredibly expensive, about the new approach is that it takes patients’ own cells, freezes them, ships them long distances, genetically alters them — and then injects them back into patients.
Developed by University of Pennsylvania researchers and licensed to drug company Novartis, the therapy would never have been possible without the U.S. government making, over many years, the world’s most robust investments in research.
But those investments are in dire jeopardy with a Trump administration budget that would cut the National Institutes of Health by 18% in just one year. The National Cancer Institute would see $1 billion in cuts. The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, more than $500 million.
The private sector can fund some such research — but most of it takes so long, with returns on investment so small and distant, it just doesn’t pay. Which is why the feds must.
The results here are stunning. In a clinical trial, the new treatment left 83% of participants cancer-free after three months.
Strong caveat, as is often required when desperately clinged-to hope can outpace reality: This is therapy aimed at just one narrow type of cancer, which afflicts some 5,000 people per year. Even within that narrow cohort, a small fraction are candidates for the new approach.
Treatment is an elaborate process that includes managing a complex, and life-threatening, immune response to the reinjected cells.
And, yes, there’s that little question of cost. Analysts estimate a bill for the individualized procedures of, wait for it, $300,000.
But the long-awaited era of personalized medicine is finally arriving. As science advances, applications will broaden. Costs will drop. On the horizon could be thousands of lives saved. Provided the U.S. government doesn’t turn its back.