Alexander Masters’s diary: The idea that could unlock dozens of new cancer drugs

Two million pounds can buy you consideration for a place on a medical trial! Every year untold numbers of potential cancer therapies are abandoned. There is simply not enough money to test all the promising drugs and interventions. To my astonishment, I’ve had an idea about how to curb this appalling waste. I am not a medic, I am a biographer and illustrator, and until two years ago I had no idea what a medical trial was; but my proposal (published in the Wellcome Trust’s new e-magazine Mosaic) has been backed by leading ethicists, doctors, researchers and medical lawyers. The suggestion is this: any rich patient who pays for a human trial of a potential medication should (if they meet the entry criteria for the study) be offered a place on the trial just like any other patient. I call it the dating agency model. It is not a way to give a rich person access to cutting-edge research that the poor can’t afford, because all such early-stage trials have to involve around 20 other patients. The only way the donor can make the trial work is to pay for 19 others to take part. The rich donor is shackled to benevolence. Paul Workman, head of Britain’s Institute for Cancer Research, estimates 95 per cent of possible new treatments for cancer have not been developed because the current funding system is ‘broken’.

Rumours of chicanery ahead of the general election in the marginal seats of rural Sussex. To help the Conservatives win Eastbourne in 2015, the Treasury wants to build a belching new dual carriageway between Lewes and Polegate that will smash through the glorious views over the Low Weald from the South Downs National Park.