Legislation to give firms incentives for child cancer drugs

WASHINGTON - When all else failed, the promise of corporate profits for pediatric cancer drugs did what cajoling to save children could not.

Legislation by Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, soon to be signed by President Barack Obama, will offer drug companies multimillion-dollar incentives to pioneer medications for rare childhood diseases that afflict too few kids to make a profit.

The legislation is meant to remedy a chronic mismatch in which the FDA has approved dozens of new drugs to combat adult cancers since 1980 - and only one for the treatment of childhood cancer.

"We're giving companies incentives to make money because the free market has failed to develop these medications," says McCaul, a five-term Austin Republican and father of five who founded the 94-member Congressional Childhood Cancer Caucus.

The measure "fundamentally transforms the way drug companies look at rare pediatric diseases and compensates for market failures that have prevented any new treatment for pediatric cancer from being developed in a generation," he added.

Dr. Eugenie Kleinerman, head of pediatrics at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, said clinicians have been frustrated for years by the absence of state-of-the-art anti-cancer medications tailored to children. M.D. Anderson treats 2,000 pediatric patients a year including 200 in clinical trials.

"But this is absolutely a move forward," says Kleinerman. "It will shine a light on the fact that we really haven't had access to the latest new therapies."

Development of such drugs still will take five to seven years.

Some 12,500 children up to the age of 18 are diagnosed with cancer each year - a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of adults who confront cancer diagnoses each year.

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Legislation to give firms incentives for child cancer drugs