ASCO 2023: Protecting our progress in the fight against cancer

I always look forward to the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s Annual Meeting, which took place in Chicago earlier this month. It’s an opportunity for the world’s leading cancer experts to celebrate the latest innovations that are changing the treatment paradigm for patients with this disease.  

This year, the meeting featured announcements about inspiring advancements that are the result of decades of research and billions of dollars of industry investment. The news coming out of the conference gave me hope for the millions of patients who are facing down cancer across the globe.

This year’s conference also reaffirmed my commitment to addressing provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that will have devastating impacts on the future of cancer research. The IRA’s price setting provisions will have an acute impact on post-approval research and include a pill penalty that discourages the development of small molecule medicines, which are small but mighty pills and tablets that make up most of the cancer medicines available to patients today.

I discussed this new – and troubling — reality at a media briefing with leaders in the biopharmaceutical industry, including Vas Narasimhan, CEO of Novartis, and Alexander Hardy, CEO of Genentech who gave specific examples of how the IRA — and specifically the pill penalty — will impact R&D and the development of new treatments for patients with cancer. Jeff Allen, a leading advocate who is the President & CEO of Friends of Cancer Research, also joined us and talked about the importance of the accelerated approval pathway which has proved critical in the fight against cancer.  

This is a watershed moment in the fight against cancer. Congress should make it a priority to fix the IRA’s pill penalty and preserve innovation in lifesaving treatments and medicines.

Learn more at PhRMA.org/IRA.