http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/dec/05/calif-teen-ta...
Clinical trials take so long because there are so many regulations about safety. You can argue that cancer patients are going to die anyway, so let them decide to take whatever drugs they want. On the other hand, this opens the most vulnerable people up to those that have the most to gain from exploiting them.
There is a lot of red tape involved in getting a medical drug to market, but a lot of it is there for good reason.
Clinical trials take so long because it takes so long to perform the study. Clinical trials cost so much because of regulations, and because of sparing no expense to make them happen more quickly.
Biology is slow, so effective and scientifically accurate trials are slow. These slow trials are required because of regulations for health and safety reasons, which means time to market is slow for drugs.
Which means complaining about the 25 year time to market (the original parent's comment) is really the same as complaining about regulations. Drop the regulations and companies are no longer required to do scientifically accurate/responsible studies, which means faster to-market times (and less safe drugs).
But when you're dealing with biology, and particularly human biology, you are subject to iterating at the speed of the biology. Depending on the type of cancer, accruing enough people so that you can actually determine efficacy and then waiting to see how the people do on the treatment can take easily 5 years, perhaps 15.
And while a huge number of treatments look promising at this stage of development, the vast majority end up not being effective. The chances of success, amount of effort, and potential monetary payoff to the basic researchers, are all less favorable than a startup.