If the Food and Drug Administration's policy stands, cancer patients will have to wait many more years to get access to new drugs, and they will have fewer options in the process.

A fresh crop of caution inside the FDA may keep the agency out of the news, but it won't keep cancer patients from dying.

When it comes to making new drugs safer, most of the obvious solutions are already accounted for; we have reached the flat part of a curve that measures incremental safety against the additional cost.