Researchers said on Tuesday that if the entire world worked together more quickly to approve novel cancer medications, around 1.5 million lives could be saved annually.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved pembrolizumab in 2016 as a successful treatment for the majority of lung cancers.
The prediction was based on how long it took for two recent cancer medications to receive global approval after getting U.S. approval.
Enzalutamide, a prostate cancer treatment drug approved by the FDA in 2012, took an additional seven years to receive approval in China, in part because different trials had to be carried there.
According to an analysis done by the Bloomberg New Economy International Cancer Coalition, if other nations had approved the medication alongside the FDA, 284,000 years of patient lives could have been saved.
The researchers projected from their findings and calculated that if each of the seven cancer medications approved by the FDA annually were authorized globally, the number of cancer-related deaths would be reduced by 10–20 percent.
