Cancer treatment has been commercialised and is no longer primarily focused on helping patients live longer, according to a group of over 30 medics and academics from around the world.
Writing in The Lancet, a medical journal, the doctors lamented “a shift over the past few decades from predominantly publicly funded clinical trials designed to answer questions important to patients, to industry-funded trials which aim to achieve regulatory approval or commercial advantage.”
According to Christopher Booth of Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, there are “growing concerns” among professionals that some new treatments are not helping patients live longer or feel better.
Announcing the establishment of their Common Sense Oncology initiative, the group, which includes hospital oncologists and university-based researchers, claimed that “the industry’s control of the research agenda has created a system that is predominantly focused on new cancer medicines at the expense of investigating new approaches to surgery, radiotherapy, palliative care and prevention.”
They further alleged that “a substantial proportion of industry revenue is used for marketing campaigns aimed at influencing patients, policy-makers and oncologists irrespective of clinical need.”
Arguing for a change of course, the doctors called for a ”recalibrated approach that is more patient-centred and prioritises equitable cancer care” as well as ”treatments that improve survival and quality of life” and are “accessible to all patients”.
The statement followed the recent publication of research by Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Southampton suggesting that around 75% of cancer research funding went to pre-clinical or medicinal research that does not involve patients.
While over USD$24bil (RM109bil) was spent worldwide on cancer research between 2016 and 2020, most of the outlay did not go into primary treatment research in areas such as surgery and radiotherapy, which received less than 5% between them. – dpa
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