ICYMI – WSJ: The Arrow of U.S. Cancer Progress

In case you missed it, The Wall Street Journal editorial team published an opinion piece yesterday online and in today’s print edition on the progress biopharmaceutical research companies have made in the fight against cancer and will continue to make as companies explore new avenues to treat the disease.

Importantly, it acknowledges the crucial need for a robust ecosystem in the U.S. that supports and encourages innovation to fight cancer and the other serious diseases facing patients and America’s health care system.

A few highlights:

• “The National Cancer Institute and other researchers published new findings on cancer’s incidence and death rate in the U.S. over the last decade that show better outcomes and longer lives. The mortality rate fell 1.5% a year on average for all cancers from 2002 to 2011, while new cases of cancer dropped 0.5% a year over the same period.”
• “In an important intellectual development, the official registries and statistics are beginning to reflect a more profound medical understanding of cancer, or rather cancers, which are genetic mutations that are now less and less defined by the tissues of the body where they develop.”
• “Breast cancer is no longer tracked as a single disease but by its four major molecular subtypes that are approximated by hormone receptor status and expression of the HER-2 gene. For the first time, oncology researchers can now study breast cancers on a more accurate and granular level, which potentially could lead to more precise and better therapies targeted at specific cells.”

The WSJ piece complements this week’s Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies documentary, which demonstrated the significant strides that have been made in cancer research and the challenges researchers will face as we develop innovative new medicines for difficult-to-treat cancers.

Read more about the progress America’s biopharmaceutical companies have made in cancer research here.

Watch inspirational stories of patients who have survived rare and deadly forms of cancer because of innovative cancer medicines here.