EU rules blamed for high cancer drug costs
EU RULES placing “unreasonable burdens” on drug licensing are making cancer deaths more likely, according to two top scientists.
Angus Dalgleish, professor of oncology at the University of London, and Prof Keith Lewis, director of science and technology consultancy Sciovis, have criticised the EU’S Clinical Trial Directive, saying it has “killed academic research” by making trials so “horrendously expensive” that only the largest pharmaceutical companies can afford to get new products registered.
In their joint report, Let’s Embrace World-class Scientific Collaboration, they claim the directive pushes up the cost of treatment for UK taxpayers, with cancer drugs costing on average £5,000 a month. The report states: “Patients suffer from directives. The Clinical Trial Directive was put forward in the spirit of harmonisation but was, in fact, a mechanism to make trials so horrendously expensive that only Big Pharma could afford to get their products registered.
“This conveniently made it extremely difficult for smaller companies and generics to compete. Unfortunately, this killed clinical academic research into innovative treatments.”
Citing pancreatic cancer’s “dreadful prognosis”, the report adds: “Even if a clinical trial can be mounted and is successful to the point where there is no reason to prevent licensing a non-toxic agent that increases pancreatic cancer survival, the EU mechanism demands another randomised study on a scale that is commercially unaffordable.”
Calling for Britain to decide its own funding objectives post-brexit, rather than having to pay into EU schemes over which it has no control, the report claims decision making in EU science programmes has become increasingly political, describing their administration as a “bureaucratic nightmare”.
The report also criticises Sir Paul Nurse, former president of the Royal Society, for saying Brexit will be a “disaster” for British science, pointing out that overseas funding for UK research and development fell for the third consecutive year during the period 2014 to 2017, with the business community providing the largest contribution (68 per cent).
The UK receives the worst science funding from the EU’S programme – half of what Germany receives, less than a third of Italy’s total and under a quarter of Poland’s income.
The report adds: “After we leave, only one of the top 10 research universities in Europe will be in an EU country (Sweden), as eight of them are in the UK!
“Technological innovation is an integral part of our British history that has given rise to the most incredible inventions, from the steam train to the jet engine and from the telephone to the television – not to forget discovery of the DNA double helix. The list goes on and on: none of these were done with EU funding.”