NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Thursday, June 9, 2016

Giving out free cancer drugs would not help the poorest parts of Africa, the head of pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has told the BBC.

Pascal Soriot said “dramatic” progress was being made in treating tumours, and defended the company’s pricing policy. And he said that training doctors, not the cost of drugs, was the biggest issue in the world’s poorest countries.

Access to treatment has been one of the key themes of the world’s biggest cancer conference.The annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago heard repeated examples of how cancer care was improving for patients.

And AstraZeneca was just one of the big pharmaceutical companies presenting their latest data – including on its new class of DNA Damage Response (or DDR) inhibitors.