Seems like there needs to be a DARPA with a cancer focus, funding only high-risk, high-payoff projects with people routinely replaced on a 5-year or so basis to mitigate bureaucracy formation.
Although individual projects typically last three to five years, major technological challenges may be addressed over longer time periods, ensuring patient investment on a series of focused steps and keeping teams together for ongoing collaboration. Continued funding for DARPA projects is based on passing specific milestones, sometimes called “go/no-go’s.
From the DARPA website:
To maintain an entrepreneurial atmosphere and the flow of new ideas, DARPA hires Program Managers for only four to six years because the best way to foster new ideas is to bring in new people with fresh outlooks. New people also ensure that DARPA has very few institutional interests beyond innovation, because new Program Managers are willing to redirect the work of their predecessors – and even undo it, if necessary.
DARPA is a sinkhole for money and brainpower that produces practically nothing of market value. The DARPA model is what's wrong with healthcare R&D.
It is the unavoidable nature of government programs to be very expensive and slow. The major medical advances will come from the private firms that minimize entanglement with the government.
I'm with you in principle on the nature of government programs, but the private sector is notoriously short-sighted. Witness big pharma's focus on weight loss, painkillers and erection maintanence well beyond active reproductive years.
There needs to be some vision beyond short-term profits to incent drastic leaps.
Perhaps venture capital should given incentives. If there are breakthroughs coming they'll only happen through funded companies.
The other possibility, which I'm sure is unpopular to utter around here, is that there are no cancer breakthroughs to be made in a reasonable time frame and the capital markets and big pharma are behaving quite rationally.
Despite all the billions poured into cancer research over the last 30 years the advancements seem pretty weak, from my limited understanding. Apparently they use eight years cancer free as the mark to declare you cured. But then people often relapse and drop dead young not so long after that.
At some point it might make sense to admit pouring more money into drug and treatment research is detracting from other pursuits. You could probably make a much bigger dent in cancer by studying preventive nutrition and how to make it widespread.
Cancer has a single name, but it's really a wide range of different issues. Some forms of cancer are eleminated by taking drugs with minimal side effects others will still kill you.
