In her poignantly written and exhaustively reported series, “The Edge of Medicine,” Geeta Anand showed that the fruits of the golden age of biological discovery increasingly are out of reach for dying patients and explained why.
In “Saying No to Penelope,” a biotechnology company refused to answer the request from the father of a four-year-old child dying of cancer to make available a potentially lifesaving treatment still in testing. The story illustrated not only the anguish of her family but explained the dilemma experienced by company officials facing the very real fear the FDA would stop their clinical trial-and sink their company-if the child, Penelope, died while on their drug. The tension between wanting to help a patient and trying to continue to develop a treatment and keep a business alive is played out every day as the desperately ill beg to get medicines still in development.
In “Lab Rat?” Ms. Anand reveals why cancer cocktails–believed to hold the best hope for curing cancer–still aren’t widely used. She tells the story by focusing on people who refuse to wait; they’re cobbling together their own drug cocktails to try to save themselves or loved ones. The story portrays the efforts of a father designing a treatment regimen for his terminally ill son, but it is also a hard-nosed look at the failures of leadership in the government and medical community in moving forward a lifesaving approach to a disease that kills 565,000 Americans a year.
In “Burden of Proof: As Costs Rise, new Medicines Face Pushback,” Ms. Anand shows how the exorbitant prices of new biotech medicines are reverberating through the health-care system, costing terminally ill patients their lives. She tells how insurers are increasingly pushing back on paying for medicines to treat devastating diseases, using the technicality that the medicines were FDA approved for other conditions.