Ignoring the big C

Cancer will kill more than half a million Americans this year. Scientists are desperate to find cures, but weak federal funding and high research costs driven by private-company greed are crippling their efforts.

By Greg Barrett

Oct 11, 2004 | The latest artillery in the war on cancer waits, ready for action, in Dr. Susan Mallery's Ohio State laboratory: the map of the human genome, biological compounds, and all the molecular know-how to take direct aim at a prolific killer. Armed with medical science's newest precision weapons, Mallery is edge-of-her-seat eager to test a novel way to prevent head and neck tumors from recurring. But for now, her research lacks one thing. The drug. A California for-profit company that sells the experimental compound, a protein called Endostatin, is effectively holding it hostage at $572 per milligram. Mallery and her colleagues need enough of the drug to test it in a time-release model. The experiment requires a gram -- about three tablespoons -- which will cost $572,000.

"They pretty much have you by the jugular," Mallery says of the cancer capitalists. "This isn't something you can just whip up in a back-lab garage."

In its best and purest form Endostatin can cost as little as $1.36 per milligram, or $1,363 per gram, when manufactured in bulk by industry for tests in humans, says Dr. Judah Folkman of Children's Hospital Boston, whose lab discovered the protein's potential to block the growth of some tumors. The research-grade Endostatin sold commercially by San Diego's EMD Biosciences, is unfit for humans. It's a lower-grade product made in smaller quantities for preliminary tests in animals and cell cultures -- and can be so inexpensive to make that biotech companies have given it away when scientific experiments promise to eventually generate profits.

At the moment Mallery is talking with Alchemgen Therapeutics, in Houston, about just such a deal. But typically, when scientists like Mallery first attempt to hatch cures without industry sponsorship, they are at the mercy of the free market. Society be damned.

Mallery's early research shows that Endostatin might even inhibit Kaposi's sarcoma, the most common AIDS-related cancer, made notorious by Tom Hanks' character in the movie "Philadelphia." "But it's not like baking cake: add a pinch of this and a pinch of that. You have to try a bunch of controlled-release formulations," Mallery says. "It's not that you can't get Endostatin. You can buy it, but it is ungodly."

EMD Biosciences, a boutique seller of compounds used in disease research, would not explain the wildly steep price difference between human- and animal-grade Endostatin. "There is a list of things you are not supposed to tell anybody," says Cyndy Lane, the company's product manager.

Steve Schwendeman, a University of Michigan chemist collaborating with Mallery, shrugs it off. Price gouging in wartime is not unusual. "It is not a problem unique to Endostatin," he says. "This is a problem that goes throughout our industry."

Declared by Congress three decades ago, the "war on cancer" is today farmed out to 181 drug and biotech companies whose existence depends on profits and investments. Leading cancer scientists in academia and government say their pursuit of the enemy is increasingly shackled to stock quotes, aggressive patent strategies, tightly held trade secrets and the legal wrangling over the spoils of success: more than $60 billion in yearly revenue, according to admittedly "lowball" estimates by the National Cancer Institute.

"I recognize a pharmaceutical company's need to make back money, but the bottom line is we're trying to cure cancer," says Howard Hughes Medical Institute scientist Dr. Brian Druker, who helped discover the cancer drug Gleevec. "Our priorities are wrong when the goal becomes, Let's make money first, and if it happens to help the health of the population, then good."

While 1,500 Americans die daily from cancer, scientists are being forced to drag their feet rather than run to the cures they suspect are within reach of today's newest science. That is the conclusion drawn from an examination of hundreds of patents and lawsuits, and from interviews with more than 40 scientists, stockbrokers, senators, professors, patients, industry executives and government officials. The current fight is not the war that Washington promised. Not even close.

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