In a very recent article, Jake Berstein, reporter at ProPublica, highlights and ilustrates the raising concern about how drugs that are further investigated as potential cancer agents are chosen and therefore more specificaly why the cheep drug are hardly ever chosen. Starting with the story of Michael Retsky (a MGHI amabassador), who pionnered the use of metronomic chemotherapy as a maintenance therapy in colon cancer on himself in 1994, Jake Berstien then interview several researchers such as Vikas Sukhatme, Harvard faculty dean for academic programs at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston or the Victor J. Aresty Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Michael Baum, former president of the British Oncological Association, to explore the reasons of the absence of testing of generic cheap drugs in oncology clinical trials. The sad conclusion is given by one researcher : “What is scientific and sexy is driven by what can be monetized.”

You can freely read it the whole article here: http://www.propublica.org/article/w...