The ROI of Beating Cancer

Talk about pro-progress news—and a pro-progress lesson for government. New data from a cancer vaccine trial is a good reminder of what the half-century-old War on Cancer is actually worth. Patients who received a personalized mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer and mounted an immune response lived longer than those who did not, according to results presented at a major cancer research conference. Pancreatic cancer is notoriously lethal, killing more than 90 percent of patients within five years. Caution is warranted about these encouraging results: The trial covered only 16 patients and the results need replication. Still, producing a durable immune response against this particular cancer was something researchers had long thought medicine couldn’t do. President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971. After more than $500 billion in today’s dollars, cancer remains the second leading cause of death in the United States—right where it was when the fight began. That apparent stasis obscures considerable progress, however. A recent paper by economist Tomas Philipson and colleagues finds that between 1988 and 2000 alone, improved detection and treatment added roughly 23 million life-years in the US, worth about $1.9 trillion in economic value. The forward-looking numbers from this medical megaproject are even more eye-popping. Eliminating cancer mortality over the next few decades would generate an estimated $197 trillion in economic value—more than $16,000 per person per year. Cutting cancer deaths by 80 percent would capture roughly 70 percent of that total. Benchmarked against a large-scale research effort costing $500 billion to $900 billion, the implied return lands somewhere between 500 and 1,000 percent. No investor anywhere would sniff at that sort of return. Now you can see what economists mean when they call innovation a “free lunch.” Technological progress produces increases in output that are not commensurate with the costs required to generate them. Research by Benjamin Jones and Lawrence Summers finds that every dollar of R&D spending returns at least $5 in social value, and plausibly far more. Crucially, that calculation excludes health gains—longer, healthier lives—which the Philipson paper identifies as among the most valuable outputs the American innovation system produces. Good news: Artificial intelligence is becoming a force multiplier on that return. A key obstacle in cancer research has been that tumors are moving targets, genetically complex enough to evade most treatments and varied enough that what works for one patient fails the next. AI is beginning to address that, finding patterns in biological data that conventional screening would miss and helping researchers design trials with a better chance of succeeding.  Given medical innovation’s sizable ROI, basic science funding and faster regulatory review should be front-of-mind for policymakers. They are among the highest-returning policy actions a government can take—as the researchers working to treat pancreatic cancer no doubt realize. The post The ROI of Beating Cancer appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .