NYT essay: slow clinical trials, not science, are now the biggest obstacle to cancer cures
sprooos · x · 2026-09-05
Biotech editor Ruxandra Teslo argues in a New York Times guest essay that the bottleneck for new cancer drugs has shifted from science to testing.
- After interviewing dozens of oncologists at leading US centers, she found consensus: the ability to validate discoveries in patients via clinical trials is now the limiting factor.
- The cost of starting a Phase 1 trial in the US has roughly doubled over the past decade, pushing companies abroad — Australia's Phase 1 volume has nearly doubled, driven mainly by US firms.
- Incentives are asymmetric: institutions are blamed for trial harms but face little cost for slow or missing trials.
- She illustrates with the sotorasib KRAS-inhibitor trial, which gave otherwise untreatable patients access to a drug against a once "undruggable" target.
Her conclusion: without US regulatory reform, the coming wave of curative therapies won't reach patients.
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