Not Hair Loss News – Cancer Vaccines and Patent Law

Snippet from the article:

Six years from now, when my daughter turns 11, she will get a three-part human papillomavirus vaccine that will reduce her chances of getting cervical cancer by around 70 percent. Currently a little over half of American girls get the HPV vaccine, a public health intervention that will prevent tens of thousands of cancers. It’s one of modern medicine’s few success stories in finding a means of preventing cancer.

Maybe the reason we have so few cancer vaccines is that they’re harder to develop than treatments for patients who already have cancer, which are more common. But in an as yet unpublished study, economists Eric Budish and Heidi Williams teamed up with patent lawyer Ben Roin to argue that the scarcity of preventive measures and relative abundance of late stage cancer treatments can also be blamed on the distorting effects that the U.S. patent system has on medical research.

Read the rest — Why Aren’t There More Cancer Vaccines?