Sector report: oncology

Cancer is a leading cause of mortality worldwide, accounting for nearly 10 million deaths in 2020. What is less well known is if medical research could reduce cancer mortality by just 10% it would be worth $5 trillion in the US alone. The net gain would be especially large if we could reduce cancer mortality with new drugs, which are typically cheap to make once discovered. “A reduction in cancer mortality of this size does not seem beyond reach and the value of such a reduction in mortality far exceeds that of spending more on medical care today,” said Alex Tabarrok’s Launching the Innovation Renaissance report. With new digital technology and evolving patient care models, there is potential to deliver faster cancer diagnoses and more precise treatments. This would continue the trends during the past three decades. The American Cancer Society (ACS) published its annual report and found death rates by 2019 had dropped 32% from its peak in 1991. The decline stems primarily from a drop in lung cancer deaths. The report found that people are living longer after a lung cancer diagnosis “because more people are being diagnosed at an early stage of the disease”, as well as the drop in smoking in the US, according to the ACS. “Accelerating declines in the cancer death rate show the power of prevention, screening, early diagnosis, treatment and our overall potential to move closer to a world without cancer,” the ACS added. The value derived from better cancer-related healthcare is part of the reason governments focus on research and startups. In 2016, the then-US Vice President Joseph Biden launched the Cancer Moonshot, an ambitious initiative to accelerate efforts to prevent, diagnose and treat cancer with the aim of making a decade’s worth of progress within five years. Similarly, the European Parliament wants to see a boost to research, as part of a broader initiative to step up the fight against cancer. Its 27 member states represent 10% of the world population but account for four out of 10 cancer cases globally. “It has to be cross-border research and we have to roll out the red carpet to these scientists rather than putting obstacles in their way, as we are in some other areas,” said MEP Pieter Liese during a plenary debate leading up to the vote on the European Parliament’s report seen by Science Business. Member states should make stronger commitments to public-private cooperation and increase “by at least 20% the mobilisation of…

Subscribe to go deeper

GCV subscribers get access to all our proprietary data and deep-dive articles, as well as the global directory of CVC investors.



Not sure if you have a subscription?
James Mawson

James Mawson is founder and chief executive of Global Venturing.