Close cancer loophole now to save children’s lives | Letters

Children and young people are being denied the latest cancer treatments by outdated European regulations. Pharmaceutical companies are able to use a loophole in EU legislation to avoid trialling cancer drugs in children - despite evidence that these treatments could work. An analysis of European Medicines Agency data by the Institute of Cancer Research shows that since 2012, the loophole has been enacted to prevent 33 new cancer drugs from being evaluated in children. There is evidence that at least some of these treatments could be effective against children's cancers.

Children's cancers are rare, and there is little financial incentive for companies to develop drugs for them. The current EU paediatric regulation could do much more to ensure that children benefit from the dramatic advances in treatment we are seeing for adult cancers. The regulation is badly out of date. It allows pharmaceutical companies to opt out of running paediatric trials simply because the adult cancer a drug targets does not occur in children. But these days, scientists understand that it is a cancer's genetic causes - rather than where it happens to grow in the body - which are the most important factor in determining which treatments work.