Although there is, as yet, no cure for either of these diseases, new medicines are saving lives and improving the quality of life for patients. In some cases, they are reducing health care costs as well. At the beginning of this century, almost no one survived cancer for long.
Pharmaceutical research is our best hope of reducing both the human and economic costs of cancer.
When AIDS was first identified in 1983, there were no medicines available to treat this terrible disease. Today there are more than 50 approved medicines and another 124 in development. Combination drug therapy has reduced AIDS deaths by more than 70 percent from 1994 to 1997. It has also enabled thousands of people with AIDS and HIV to go back to work, get off disability and get on with their lives. After four or five days of tests, the doctors treating Reece found he had the type of leukemia that could be treated with a new medicine.