"A cure for cancer." 

That phrase once served as shorthand for a pipe dream, something nice in theory but beyond human reach in the same way as “American energy independence.”  

As we now know, however, we actually have achieved energy independence over the past two decades, thanks to American ingenuity.  

Today, as separate announcements over the past week confirm, a cure for cancer also appears increasingly within reach.  

And once again, humanity has American free markets, intellectual property (IP) protections, and innovative spirit to thank.  

In an extraordinary development that deserves far more celebration than it has received, Moderna and Merck announced successful results for an experimental personalized mRNA vaccine to defeat melanoma following surgery.  Without descending too deeply into the medical weeds, it successfully met the study’s recurrence-free survival threshold, as well as the important secondary endpoint of stopping the disease’s spread to other organs.  In combination with other treatments, the new drug reduced recurrence by nearly 50%.  

Accordingly, it marks the first personalized mRNA cancer treatment to succeed in a Phase III trial.  

How the treatment works is even more remarkable.  

After removing a patient’s tumor, scientists sequence it, identify mutations specific to that individual cancer and manufacture a personalized mRNA treatment targeting those mutations.  In other words, the treatment attempts to teach the patient’s own immune system to recognize and destroy residual cancer cells before they can reestablish themselves.  

Separately this week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a new drug that doubled the survival times for victims of pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest types of all cancers.  

Within recent memory, all of this almost amounted to science fiction.  

Today, it’s science.  

Critically, moreover, none of it happened in America by accident or coincidence.  

America accounts for an astonishing two-thirds of all new drugs introduced to the world each year, and possesses the world’s most dynamic innovation economy because we’ve historically maintained the world’s strongest protections for patents and other IP, freer markets and resisted government price controls compared to our industrialized competitors.  

Those characteristics are particularly important in pharmaceuticals.  

Developing new medicines requires staggering expenditures of money and time, with no guarantee whatsoever of success.  Countless promising drugs fail somewhere between laboratory discovery and final regulatory approval, but investors nevertheless finance those efforts because America’s patent system provides successful innovators the opportunity to recoup those enormous investments and earn returns commensurate with the risks undertaken.  

As patent holder Abraham Lincoln observed, strong patent protections "added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery and production of new and useful things."  

In the current instance, Moderna began pursuing personalized mRNA cancer treatments over a decade ago, when therapeutic cancer vaccines had accumulated a long record of disappointment.  Yet scientists persisted, investors continued risking capital and Merck eventually committed hundreds of millions of dollars to the effort.  

Now humanity may reap the reward.  

That lesson arrives at an especially important moment, because politicians increasingly attack pharmaceutical patents, intellectual property protections and market-based drug pricing as obstacles to affordability.  

Weakening patent protections or imposing government price controls only reduce potential returns from successful medicines and inevitably reduce investor willingness to finance risky research into diseases for which success remains uncertain.  

Simply stated, there’s no government-mandated discount on a medicine that never gets invented.  

Nor do Americans alone benefit from our uniquely productive innovation ecosystem.  

Other nations may impose tighter price controls, invest less in pharmaceutical research and free-ride upon American innovation, but they nevertheless enjoy longer and healthier lives because American scientists, entrepreneurs and investors assumed the risks necessary to discover those treatments.  

That represents one of America’s greatest and most underappreciated gifts to humanity, and the parallel with American energy independence is instructive.  

Government planners didn’t suddenly discover vast new petroleum reserves beneath our feet.  Rather, American entrepreneurs combined technologies such as hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, risked private capital and transformed resources previously considered unrecoverable into an energy revolution.  

Markets accomplished what conventional wisdom had declared unrealistic, and now something similarly breathtaking is occurring in medicine.  

To be sure, cancer remains far from “cured,” and many formidable scientific obstacles remain.  We’re nevertheless moving steadily from merely treating cancers to eliminating them with extraordinary precision.  

“A cure for cancer” may therefore be transitioning from figure of speech to foreseeable reality. 

If so, we should remember what helped make it possible: American ingenuity, American investment, American patent protection and America’s comparatively free-market economic system.  

We should strengthen that model, not undermine it, because the ultimate dividend from innovation won’t be measured in profits or rising stocks, but in lives saved.