Longtime director of the National Cancer Institute Vincent DeVita has a new book out (with daughter Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn) on the fight against cancer. (DeVita is also a former director of the Yale Cancer Center, and a former physician in chief at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center). From a New York Times review, via Ira Stoll, Future of Capitalism:

The regulatory caution of the Food and Drug Administration has been a thorn in his side for decades: “I’d like to be able to say that as cancer drugs have become increasingly more complex and sophisticated, the F.D.A. has as well. But it has not.” In fact, he writes, “the rate-limiting step in eradicating cancer today is not the science but the regulatory environment we work in.”

And Laura Landro covers the book at the Wall Street Journal:

The biggest obstacle to proper treatment, in Dr. DeVita’s view, is the FDA. The agency, he believes, acts with an overabundance of caution, approving a drug for one cancer but restricting its use for another. It has created a lot of “Dr. No’s,” who are “prone to saying no to cancer drugs.”…

Dr. DeVita calls on regulators to allow testing at earlier stages of a disease rather than only after current treatments have failed, and he argues that more drugs should be available, before approval, for “compassionate” use in the absence of other treatments. “People are not dying because the drugs don’t exist,” he writes, “but because they can’t get them.”

Filed under: FDA, pharmaceuticals