Seventy years ago, Dr. Jonas Salk announced to an astonished radio audience he had developed a polio vaccine. It must have seemed too good to be true.
The year before, polio claimed 3,000 American lives and infected another 60,000. Millions lived in fear of contracting the incurable disease. Salk’s vaccine changed all that.
In 1955, it was deemed safe and effective, and President Eisenhower cleared the way for the vaccine to be produced and distributed to children throughout the country. Within one year, deaths attributed to polio declined by half. Soon, what was for a millennium an incurable disease became a thing of the past all over the world.
Can a similar breakthrough happen again? What if we could detect almost all cancers in the earliest stages when less-invasive treatments mean lifesaving cures?
The answer: Mortality rates — and health care costs — would plummet because most cancers could be cured or controlled using existing therapies.
The good news is this innovation exists today in the form of multi-cancer early detection (MCED) from one blood test. The bad news is we don’t have an Eisenhower administration determined to deliver a medical game-changer to as many Americans as possible.
Instead, we have a Biden administration — in the form of the Federal Trade Commission and Chair Lina Khan that Biden named to head it — standing in the way and creating an impenetrable barrier to access to millions of cancer patients.
Here’s how. California-based Grail is a pioneer in the MCED space and wants to merge with another California company, Illumina, which makes the machines used by Grail to scan our blood for signs of cancer. Illumina says it wants to bring Grail’s potential breakthrough test beyond the concierge doctors and self-insured health plans and to the entire country.
But this isn’t good enough for Khan, an avowed critic of corporate mergers. She deems this anti-competitive and offers the excuse that Grail has no present competitors. But neither did Edison’s light bulb. Was that a monopoly attack on darkness after sundown? By this logic, Khan would have blocked Salk’s one-of-a-kind vaccine as well.
Fundamentally, this is more than a technical difference of opinion over antitrust language. It may be the single worst regulatory mistake this country has ever made because early detection could do for cancer what Salk did for polio.
Only one in seven cancers are found through mammograms, colonoscopies, and similar tests. And even then, most cancers are detected at later and more lethal stages.
A study by Avalere Health found that more than half of pancreatic cancer cases are discovered at Stage 3-4 — the latest and lethal stage. Less than 10 percent of people with pancreatic cancer live five years or more. Detecting earlier — at Stage 1 or 2 — would increase the chances of five-year survival to 40 percent.
And treating cancer earlier is less toxic and less costly. The first-year cost to Medicare of treating stage 1 NSCLC is $54,000 per patient. First year NSCLC treatment costs are stage 4 is $148,000. Treating ovarian cancer at stage 1 is $47,000. Stage 4 costs $122,000.
Early detection. Accessible cures. Tolerable treatments. Historic savings to a government health system going bankrupt. This isn’t too good to be true. It’s the stated goal of an American innovation that Lina Khan and the Biden administration can’t see past shutting down. Abusing the consumer protection power of the FTC to stop mergers by any means necessary is the textbook definition of regulatory abuse.
They should heed the words of Dr. Salk himself: “There is hope in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality.”
The Grail-Illumina partnership can be part of the same hope and same courage to overcome another disease few have dared to dream could be defeated. It ought to be given the chance.
Darrell Issa represents California’s 48th District.