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Interesting article about potential low-cost effective cancer treatments that Big Pharma is not researching because there is no profit in it for them. From Pacific Standard:

The War on Cancer: Big Pharma Is Keeping Us From Developing Low-Cost Treatments

Big Pharma’s focus on blockbuster cancer drugs squeezes out research into potential treatments that are more affordable. Says one researcher: “What is scientific and sexy is driven by what can be monetized.”

Numerous laboratory, animal, and small human studies suggest that low-dose, continuous chemotherapy holds promise in shrinking tumors and preventing cancer’s recurrence. But the next step—testing what Retsky did in a large-scale clinical trial—is a long shot given the way cancer treatments are developed today.

Take Michelle Holmes, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. She’s been trying for years to raise money for trials on the effects of aspirin on breast cancer. Animal studies, in vitro experiments, and analysis of patient outcomes suggest that aspirin might help inhibit breast cancer from spreading. Yet even her peers on scientific advisory boards appear uninterested, she says. “For some reason a drug that could be patented would get a randomized trial, but aspirin, which has amazing properties, goes unexplored because it’s 99 cents at CVS,” says Holmes.



Sukhatme and his wife Vidula, an epidemiologist, are among those trying to do something about it. They have spearheaded a new non-profit,  Global Cures, to promote alternative treatments that are unlikely to attract commercial interest from drug companies. Global Cures calls these forsaken therapies “financial orphans". To help patients and their doctors, the non-profit is producing reports that explain the science behind promising orphan therapies—those that have shown merit in animal studies and limited human data. And Global Cures also has set itself a more challenging goal—to find the money for clinical trials.


The NIH, particularly through the National Cancer Institute, contributes to about 15 percent of all clinical trials related to cancer, but the amount it gives is in decline. The agency instead partners with pharmaceutical companies or academic institutions, and the trials the NCI does support usually are for new drugs, not for re-purposing existing ones. 
