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Anti-cancer drugs: exorbitant prices

The soaring prices of new anti-cancer drugs are unrelated to development costs or to the clinical benefits these drugs offer.

Everywhere, even in the wealthiest countries, soaring spending on cancer treatments is jeopardising universal access to healthcare. The exorbitant cost of new anti-cancer drugs is one of the main causes for concern.

According to NICE, the British body that evaluates drugs’ cost-effectiveness, these high prices are chiefly driven by the profit motive: pharmaceutical companies are seeking to rake in huge profits to make up for the loss of income from drugs whose patents have expired. The prices have little to do with the benefits these drugs offer or R&D costs. But, “In a health system with limited resources, if increasingly large sums are spent on anti-cancer drugs that are not cost-effective, it will be to the detriment of patients suffering from other diseases who are of less interest to pharmaceutical companies and patient groups.”

Concerned by this soaring expenditure, which is disproportionate to benefits for patients, an increasing number of oncologists are urging improved use of available resources as opposed to the “more is better” approach: “Continuing treatments that have no benefits, such as chemotherapy during [patients’] final weeks (...) may (…) exclude them from palliative care that would improve their quality of life and possibly even extend it.”

Oncologists are calling on health professionals and patients to be more "realistic" in their expectations to help control cancer-related healthcare costs. This is effectively an invitation to be judicious and to subject the plethora of diagnostic methods and treatments offering non-existent or negligible benefits to scrutiny.

And this applies not only in the field of oncology.

©Prescrire 1 July 2012

"The exorbitant price of cancer drugs" Prescrire Int 2012; 21 (129): 195. (Pdf, free).
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