The Right Way to Tackle Developing Countries’ Cancer Crisis

Some health advocates believe that weakening intellectual-property protections and capping prices for the most advanced cancer treatments would expand access in developing countries. However, this well-intentioned argument overlooks an inescapable reality: without strong incentives for innovation, such treatments would not exist.

In Nigeria, a cancer diagnosis is often a death sentence. Nearly 130,000 Nigerians receive a diagnosis each year, and nearly 80,000 die from the disease. The statistics are grim: an average of 33 women per day in Nigeria are infected with cervical cancer, and 22 women per day die from it.

The problem is not that interventions do not exist. Rather, Nigerians—and patients in developing economies more broadly—lack access to them. This disparity highlights a global health inequity that demands a nuanced solution rather than a simplistic one.

Breakthroughs in cancer treatment, especially immunotherapy, have drastically reduced the disease’s mortality in recent decades. A mere generation ago, the idea that the immune system could be trained to fight cancer sounded like science fiction. Today, it represents the most promising front in cancer research.

More than 30 immunotherapies, treating 25 different forms of cancer, are now approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. The results speak for themselves. Patients with advanced melanoma were once expected to survive a mere 16 weeks. But, thanks to immunotherapy, they now have a one in three chance of living a decade or longer. Likewise, for some lung cancer patients, prognoses that were once measured in months are now measured in years.