A perversely fascinating case study in market failure... Let us hope this drug actually beats the odds... and the researchers manage to raise capital despite the obvious lack of interest in the professional community...
"There is no FDA-approved way to get there from here.
Someday a dedicated medical team working beyond the reach of the FDA (perhaps in Mainland China, which already contains numerous clinics that cater to foreign medical refugees) will defeat cancer. In the intervening years or decades, terminal cancer patients in the US will be restricted to the same old patent medicines." [ http://www.lewrockwell.com/walker/walker24.html ]
"By itself, taking a drug from the laboratory all the way to completing a clinical trial, is a tremendously difficult process that is almost never completed without the direct support of pharmaceutical industry." [ http://www.depmed.ualberta.ca/dca/ ]
"It can be a problem, just as "orphan" drugs often don't make it to market because there aren't enough patients who could benefit from the them to make it profitable for drug companies to invest in developing and marketing them. In those cases, there are government programs to encourage the manufacture of these drugs. Perhaps a similar sort of program should be in place for situations like this or perhaps tax incentives to encourage pharmaceutical companies to manufacture drugs like this. Also, if this drug were truly the miracle cure that it's being represented as, believe me, pharmaceutical companies would find a way to make money off of it, either by trying to modify it to make it more effective or adding a molecule to target it more closely to the cancer cell."
[ http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/01/in_which_my_words_will_be_misinterpreted.php ]