The Apollo 11 Mission Showed Us the Power of Working Together to Achieve Daunting Challenges.
50 Years Later, the Same Spirit Inspires the Search for “Moonshot” Cures for Patients
This Saturday, July 20th, will mark 50 years since the Apollo 11 mission, in which Neil Armstrong become the first man to set foot on the moon, in an awe-inspiring example of what humanity can accomplish with a determined focus on a daunting challenge. As Greg Ip wrote this weekend in the Wall Street Journal:
The Apollo space program was the capstone of an era in which Americans took it for granted that the federal government could and should solve big challenges. It cost $25 billion, which, as a share of gross domestic product, would be almost $600 billion today. Not since then has the U.S. tried something as ambitious or as expensive.
Today, Americans still take risks and solve problems, but they don’t look to the federal government to do it... Today, business spends three times as much as the federal government [on R&D].
That’s nowhere more true than in the biopharmaceutical industry. While the federal government plays an important role in funding early-stage basic research (such as the identification of a new protein target on a virus that could potentially disrupt its replication cycle), the lion’s share of the work involved in turning a basic research discovery into an actual FDA approved medicine is done by private biopharmaceutical companies. In fact, the private sector spends about five times more -- $150 billion globally -- on medical R&D than the U.S. federal government does via the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
These massive private sector investments quite often end up in failure – only about 1 in 10 drugs that enters clinical testing ends up as an approved medicine – but for the benefits that a “win” can bring for patients, it’s well-worth the long and expensive odds.
We are just now entering the dawn of a new era of personalized medicine and cellular and gene therapies – such as a cure for a hereditary disease that can lead to blindness and CAR-T cell treatments for blood cancers. In May, the FDA approved a new single-dose curative gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) that stops the suffering of babies afflicted with this horrible disease. Last year we also saw the approval of the first therapy in an entirely new class of drugs – RNAi therapeutics – which allow for the targeted silencing of specific genes to treat diseases.
Breakthroughs like these are the fruits of decades of toil by hundreds of dedicated drug discovery scientists at biotechnology companies, and hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital investment. And many more such medical miracles are on the horizon, thanks to America’s free market system for biopharmaceuticals, which rewards successful new treatments and allows for the reinvestment necessary to continue the search for new cures.
But several proposals under consideration in Washington right now threaten to undermine that system. One of the most concerning is the so-called International Price Index, which would set the prices for certain physician and hospital administered drugs in Medicare based upon the prices paid in countries like Greece that impose artificial price controls on drugs – in effect, importing foreign price controls into the U.S. market.
Those price controls are not without harmful consequences – reduced access to new medicines for patients in those countries. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out in an editorial last year, “Of 74 cancer drugs launched between 2011 and 2018, 70 (95%) are available in the United States. Compare that with 74% in the U.K., 49% in Japan, and 8% in Greece.”
They would also jeopardize America’s status as the global leader in biopharmaceutical innovation. Today, thanks to our free market system, U.S. firms are responsible for over 60 percent of all new medicines in development – but we face mounting competition from other countries. As the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has observed, “The United States’ lead in the life sciences is being challenged. Other countries have aggressively courted life-sciences companies with lower tax rates…improved intellectual property protections and streamlined approval processes.”
Other proposals, such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s latest drug pricing plan to give the government the power to arbitrate patient access to 250 drugs, ignores the value these therapies bring to suffering patients and their families and the devastating impact it will have on investment in new therapies for Alzheimer’s and other devastating diseases. These investments will be at risk if health care decision-makers do not put individual patients at the center of their considerations.
Everyone agrees that too many patients today are facing unaffordable prices at the pharmacy counter. But the solution to that problem is to set reasonable limits on patient out-of-pocket costs, not to fundamentally disrupt the free market system that is responsible for so many groundbreaking new therapies. Indeed, a recent poll conducted by Morning Consult (and commissioned by BIO) found that lowering patient costs was the most important priority for voters when it comes to the drug pricing debate. As it stands today, patients pay on average about five times more out-of-pocket for prescriptions than for hospital care, unfairly discriminating against patients with high prescription drug costs.
Just as Americans came together 50 years ago to send a man to the moon, it’s time for all stakeholders in our healthcare system – policymakers, drug companies, hospitals, insurers, and pharmacy benefit managers – to work together for solutions that will meaningfully address patient out-of-pocket costs, while maintaining the biomedical innovation that patients 5, 10, and 50 years from now are counting on.