New re­port her­alds a rev­o­lu­tion in can­cer R&D trends - and the stick­er shock that comes with it

There’s a rev­o­lu­tion play­ing out in can­cer R&D.

Over the last decade drug de­vel­op­ers fo­cused on on­col­o­gy have teamed with reg­u­la­tors on de­sign­ing a short­er R&D path for new can­cer drugs, us­ing tri­al de­signs that have sped clin­i­cal work and slashed the num­ber of pa­tients need­ed to demon­strate safe­ty and ef­fi­ca­cy.

With the num­ber of new check­point com­bos in the clin­ic es­ca­lat­ing rapid­ly, the late-stage pipeline of new can­cer drugs has ex­plod­ed, grow­ing 7.7% in just the last year to 631 new mol­e­cules. The two ini­tial PD-1 ap­provals of Op­di­vo and Keytru­da alone spawned 135 com­bi­na­tion stud­ies. And the work over­all is chang­ing the stan­dard of care in the field — at a high cost for the pay­ers foot­ing the bill.

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