This series examined how cancer drugs have become a wildly lucrative business not just for pharma companies but hospitals and doctors, often without extending patients’ lives while exposing them to toxic harms and financial stress.
A rare mix of data journalism, science reportage and follow-the-money investigation, it showed how corporate pharmaceutical greed, a captured regulator and a complicit medical system have turned the once-sleepy oncology business into a market 10 times bigger than obesity drugs. No other news organization has done the painstaking data analysis to prove that many of these high-priced drugs don’t deliver as promised.
In crisp prose, Bloomberg detailed the anguish of patients faced with dire, life-altering diagnoses and the confusion of doctors urged to prescribe drugs touted as “revolutionary” on scant evidence. The series revealed when and where pharmaceutical companies exerted pressure on doctors and engaged with regulators. In one memorable scene, the voice of the Food and Drug Administration’s cancer chief – his own wife suffering from ovarian cancer – boomed in from a loudspeaker to fast-track a still-unproven Pfizer treatment.
The stakes were described in vivid, human terms, including the consequences after the FDA failed to require any human testing on a device meant to help maintain the shape of women’s breasts after cancer surgery. Many women later complained of stabbing pain. Some chose to get mastectomies, losing breasts that – even through radiation and chemotherapy – they might have kept.
Reporters showed companies often pushing for maximum drug doses to protect profits, exposing patients to more side effects. In a piece that ranged from India to Israel, we reported on how a roomful of Merck executives ambushed a doctor who wanted to use lower (and cheaper) doses to treat lung cancer patients. They told him it might be dangerous. But the doctor was simply relying on the company’s own original research – before it switched, with the FDA’s blessing, to a higher dose that brought in at least $825 million a year in additional revenue.
Another piece took readers inside a cancer center run by a single physician in Omaha. His practice embodies the increasingly lucrative and ethically fraught conventions of enrolling patients in clinical trials. The story documented for the first time how these trials have become a profit center for some physicians and hospitals. And it laid bare the deeply conflicted system in which doctors have no legal obligation to disclose their financial interests to patients before signing them up. An accompanying video told the heartbreaking story of a widow who is convinced her husband’s toxic treatments robbed him of precious remaining time with his family.
