Professor Sukhun Kang was motivated to turn from a promising career as a computer scientist toward studying the biopharmaceutical industry after his family member was diagnosed with a rare cancer. Why don’t we have enough drugs for devastating diseases such as the one that afflicted his relative, and why can’t we make those that we do have more widely available? Sukhun’s research shows that the costs of administering programs designed to make cancer drugs available more widely to late-stage patients have prevented their uptake.  Companies instead tend to rush into drug development and distribution when there’s a big market and a relatively well-known mechanism of disease, even when there’s a lot of competition. Diagnosing diseases that afflict relatively fewer patients attracts few resources because the prospects for profitable treatments are narrow.   The result: We may not even know what medicines are needed.

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