Letter to the Editor:

In a July 11 article, Marcia Angell claims that drug companies are "exploiting the desperation of people with a life-threatening illness" ("Prices soar for cancer drugs," News). That's utter nonsense. Avastin would not be in existence today if Genentech Inc. had not invented it.

Angell, a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, is an outspoken advocate of socialist health care and government-imposed price controls on drugs. The irony is that if she had her way, a drug such as Avastin would have never been invented in the first place.

Today, it costs almost $1 billion to bring a new drug to market. Cancer patients have hope precisely because companies are willing to risk that money in hopes of developing drugs such as Avastin, Erbitux, Gleevec, Herceptin, Nexavar, Sutent and many others.

If our government makes these drugs unprofitable, companies will simply stop trying to invent them. Researchers at the University of Connecticut's Center for Healthcare and Insurance Studies found that from 1960 to 2001, government interference in drug pricing caused $188 billion in lost spending on research and development. The "lost" medicines that might have been developed with the money could have saved about 140 million life years.

Sally C. Pipes
President and CEO
Pacific Research Institute
San Francisco