Biden’s IRA Is Harming Cancer Patients

WALL STREET JOURNAL

Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act wasn’t designed to kill cancer innovation, but new evidence reveals that’s what it’s doing. The law strongly discourages drug companies from performing the “follow-on” research after initial discoveries that accounts for a disproportionate share of progress in the fight against cancer.

The crux of the problem is that the IRA imposes price caps that shorten the effective life of a patent and applies those price controls even to later-approved uses. Thirteen years after FDA approval, biologics, which are typically infused or injected, become subject to price controls. For small-molecule drugs, typically pills or tablets, the window is only nine years. The clock starts at a drug’s first approval, leaving a follow-on or alternative use, approved years later, an insufficient period to make up the cost of research.

Two weeks ago, a study I conducted with colleagues at the University of Chicago appeared in Health Affairs. It reveals how much these provisions harm cancer research. In reviewing every Food and Drug Administration-approved cancer drug between 2000 and 2024, we found a large part of innovation in cancer treatment takes place after a therapy is first approved. About 42% of the 184 cancer therapies that were initially approved during that period had follow-on approvals—involving new uses or “indications” for an existing drug—such as treating additional cancer types or being used earlier in the disease, when treatment outcomes tend to be better.

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