Why is research in early-stage cancer research so low?

According to Budish, Roin and Williams (2015), drug development for early-stage cancer drugs is low because of missing financial incentives, and surrogates can overcome this distortion. We argue that technological barriers can also explain such low drug development. We first summarize medical literature describing these barriers and then augment their data to simultaneously assess the role of incentives versus barriers. Our results suggest that technological barriers suppress research in early-stage solid cancer and that surrogates may at best moderately increase drug development for such cancers.