Friendly Fire From Biden in the War on Cancer

The Inflation Reduction Act will put a halt to decades of private-sector progress in research and development.

Letter to WSJ.

"Your editorial “Biden’s Cancer Contradiction” (Sept. 15) on Amgen’s new lung-cancer drug, Lumakras, is on target. The Biden administration seeks to boost cancer research and development with its right hand (the cancer “moonshot”), while cutting R&D via the Inflation Reduction Act with its left hand—pun intended.

In a recent study, my co-authors and I found that cancer patients would miss out on 9.5 times as much cancer research due to the Inflation Reduction Act’s price controls as they gain from the cancer-moonshot initiative. Consider the scale: The moonshot comes with a proposed $1.9 billion annual increase in public R&D funding for cancer, about 3% of total cancer R&D. Meanwhile, private cancer research is booming. An astonishing 49% of the total Food and Drug Administration drug pipeline is for cancer, including 27% of new drugs. About two-thirds of drug R&D spending is on these FDA trials, and our analysis found that the price controls will cut it by about $18 billion a year, dwarfing the moonshot.

Our analysis isn’t extreme. We simply took as given the conservative Congressional Budget Office estimates about how much revenue will be cut as a result of price controls, and looked to the consensus scientific literature to determine the implied cut in R&D.

Despite mountains of evidence, some politicians argue that the new price controls won’t cut into medical R&D. For some reason, they think future profits don’t drive investment today. A congressional field trip to a biotech venture-capital firm may be in order. Or simply look at how little private research occurred on Covid natural immunity compared with vaccines, because natural immunity can’t be sold but vaccines can. More science depends on more profits.

Speaking of moonshots, NASA just failed to launch one. It is now inferior to private-sector space aviation. Likewise, the private sector is the heart of medical innovation. Its efforts are more important than those of the National Institutes of Health bureaucracy, which specializes in safe, politically correct research. The Inflation Reduction Act will put a halt to decades of private-sector progress in the war on cancer.

Prof. Tomas J. Philipson

University of Chicago"