Innovation Blog

New Approach to Cure Cancer
By Shlomo Maital

A new treatment for prostate cancer has been approved by America’s FDA. Prostate cancer kills some 25,000 American men annually, the second highest death toll for cancer. Once cancer spreads beyond the prostate gland, it is virtually untreatable.
According to the BBC:
   Provenge – which is designed to be used in men with advanced prostate disease – is the first of its kind to be accepted by the Food and Drug Administration. Each dose has to be individually tailored and it is an expensive treatment at $93,000 per patient.
Provenge is a kind of vaccine. White blood cells from each patient are removed, treated, and then re-injected. They are ‘persuaded’ or ‘tricked’ into attacking the prostate cancer cells all over the body.

Provenge is huge good news, but also bad news.
The good news is that this approach to treating cancer — getting our own immunity system to attack the cancer — has been studied for 50 years, and at last, scientists have managed to get it to work. It could be a promising new avenue for cancer treatment, for cancer of all kinds.
The bad news? Of course, the cost. According to the FDA, untreated men in clinical trials lived an average of 20 months. Treated men, who received Provenge, lived for an average of 24.5 months. That means that this costly drug, which cost nearly $100,000 per treatment (and whose cost cannot be reduced, because it must be tailored to each individual person), can prolong life for 4.5 months. For those with prostate cancer, these are of course precious months.
But can society afford to invest $100,000, to prolong life for 4.5 months? How much, indeed, is an added month of life worth? And what is the opportunity cost — how many lives could be saved with the resources used to prolong life for those 4.5 months?
Innovation, especially in cancer treatments, always and unavoidably confronts prickly ethical questions that cannot be evaded.