The premise of this blog post is flawed. Despite the madness of the pharmaceutical industry, we are currently experiencing a revolutionary improvement in treatment.
Essentially nothing interesting, from the patient's perspective, happened between the time that effective chemotherapy combinations were formulated (60s & 70s) and roughly ten years ago.
More recently, however, there have a surge of approvals in immunotherapy which have turned death sentence diagnoses (e.g. metastatic melanoma) into potentially survivable diseases. The 2 year survival rate for stage IV melanoma has increased from ~5-8% to 20-40%. The tools used to achieve this increase in survival are broadly applicable to other cancers and have been achieving gains in survival for lung cancer, bladder cancer, &c. More importantly, immunotherapy research is just getting started and there are lots of promising approaches (personalized vaccines, engineered T-cells, oncolytic viruses, more interesting routes of immune modulation). Many of these approaches seem to synergize. So, treatment has improved dramatically for many indications and looks like it will continue improving. There are some cancers which a patient is still unlikely to survive (pancreatic, GBM), but the industry's output of useful drugs is definitely not stagnant.
Now, the pricing of those drugs once approved is a whole different problem...
I used to work in cancer research and I don't think it's fair to say that we're experiencing a revolutionary improvement. It looks pretty marginal to me. Sure, some cancers (the "easy" ones) are making significant improvements and grinding down on death and recurrence rates.
But most of what you are describing is forward-thinking, not an accurate description of today.
Were metastatic melanoma and NSCLC considered "easy" before immunotherapy? My understanding is that they were near certain death sentences.
I think that the progress so far certainly looks revolutionary compared with the previous few decades. I also agree though that a lot of excitement is related to perceived future benefits.
If startups were making progress this slow on things like self-driving cars, we'd be very underwhelmed. At this rate, we'll all be dead before the majority of cancer treatments are successful.
Technology starts off slow and then, as the base of knowledge upon which one can build expands, it snowballs into daily breakthroughs and progress before plateauing and repeating.
In other words: different industries. Apples and oranges. Do you really think only programmers have creativity and innovation?
Yup, my background is in biophysics but I do software engineering because it's relatively easy. billion-line codebases aren't really complicated to a single cell.
I mean, we've had a small percentage of the planet's human population * 65 years or so to engineer code complexity?
Even given intelligent (depending on the code's author) design vs random evolutionary pressure... every living thing on the planet * billions (/Sagan voice) of years is a long time to compete with.
Essentially nothing interesting, from the patient's perspective, happened between the time that effective chemotherapy combinations were formulated (60s & 70s) and roughly ten years ago.
More recently, however, there have a surge of approvals in immunotherapy which have turned death sentence diagnoses (e.g. metastatic melanoma) into potentially survivable diseases. The 2 year survival rate for stage IV melanoma has increased from ~5-8% to 20-40%. The tools used to achieve this increase in survival are broadly applicable to other cancers and have been achieving gains in survival for lung cancer, bladder cancer, &c. More importantly, immunotherapy research is just getting started and there are lots of promising approaches (personalized vaccines, engineered T-cells, oncolytic viruses, more interesting routes of immune modulation). Many of these approaches seem to synergize. So, treatment has improved dramatically for many indications and looks like it will continue improving. There are some cancers which a patient is still unlikely to survive (pancreatic, GBM), but the industry's output of useful drugs is definitely not stagnant.
Now, the pricing of those drugs once approved is a whole different problem...