How Washington Is Nixing a Cancer Cure

"RIT is the most effective, least used treatment in oncology," says Dr. Bruce Cheson of Georgetown University Hospital, who treated Sen. Fred Thompson for lymphoma. (Thompson's mild form of the disease did not require RIT.) Many lymphoma patients, including NEWSWEEK's Jamie Reno, believe they simply would not be alive today had they not received Bexxar or Zevalin several years ago.

Some nonradiological alternatives do exist. But another relatively new drug, fludarabine, described by some doctors as "just as good" as RIT, actually achieved results about 10 percent worse than Bexxar and Zevalin in one study, though it is preferable for some patients who cannot tolerate radioactive treatment.

You would think all of this would mean booming sales for Bexxar and Zevalin and cheering from the government, which has approved precious few drugs in recent years that actually show success in treating cancer.

Wrong. The fathers and mothers and husbands and wives and sisters and brothers who are living longer because of RIT are apparently of no (that's right: no) concern. Maybe these doctors and bureaucrats would feel differently if someone in their family had lymphoma.

The first reason RIT is in trouble has to do with doctors who work in offices or small hospitals that are not equipped for what is known as "nuclear medicine." Administering RIT requires special licensing and special equipment. Because most oncologists not affiliated with major cancer centers don't have that particular board certification or technology, they aren't likely to recommend that their lymphoma patients go for RIT at a big hospital. If they do, the doctors are more likely to lose patients and reimbursements, because once these oncologists send their patients to a doctor certified to administer RIT, as one specialist told me, "they don't come back." Not all of these office-park oncologists are greedy; some have good reasons to prescribe another treatment. It depends, of course, on the individual patient. But generally speaking, Bexxar and Zevalin are being dramatically underutilized, even though they have already saved thousands of lives.

With sluggish sales, the future of these wonder drugs is uncertain, as The New York Times explained in a front-page article last summer. But what the Times and the rest of the press has missed is that Washington is now poised to deliver the coup de grâce to RIT.