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Scores of drugs to treat cancer, cardiovascular disease and other ailments are in shortage, and experts agree the main cause is the underlying weakness of the generic drug industry.
This article originally appeared on Undark. When chatting at cocktail parties about his job, Mark Ratain, an oncologist and pharmacologist at the University of Chicago, often asks a short riddle: "Your doctor gives you a prescription for a new drug. The pharmacist says, 'Make sure you take it on an empty stomach, twice a day.' What do you think would happen if you took it with food?" Most don't get the answer right. "Nobody would ever say, 'Well, I could die from an overdose,'" Ratain says. Advertisement: That's exactly what could happen to anyone taking the drug nilotinib — approved by the...