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Among the pharmaceutical companies’ many objections to the Biden administration’s drug pricing program is a set of provisions the industry says will warp how cancer drugs are developed. On Wednesday, AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot proposed a new solution.

“What we were asking — and are asking now — is a very simple fix,” said Soriot at the STAT Future Summit, saying that “the impact on health care costs would be very marginal.”

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The problem, executives say, is that companies developing cancer drugs today generally start small and then go big. They seek approval first in a small setting, such as patients who have exhausted all other therapies, where it’s easiest in terms of trial size and length to show a benefit. Then they go into larger settings, such as newly diagnosed patients, where studies take longer but the revenue potential is much higher.

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