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 The spiraling cost of cancer medicines is a growing concern for
doctors and their patients, many of whom struggle to pay for new
medicines that often cost $10,000 a month.
Sky-high prices have made oncology hugely profitable, with IMS
Health forecasting global cancer drug sales of at least $150 billion
by 2020. Scientists, however, believe today's prices are simply not
sustainable as more and more people need treatment.
Writing in the journal Cell on Thursday, European and U.S. experts
laid out a blueprint for reining in costs by increasing the role of
academic research groups, working alongside new kinds of private
companies, in the development of new drugs.
Rather than simply licensing discoveries to Big Pharma, academic
groups should in future consider working with smaller companies that
commit to capping prices, low-cost generic drug companies or
non-profit organizations, they said.
"Something has to change. This is a call to arms," Paul Workman, one
of the paper's authors and chief executive of Britain's Institute of
Cancer Research, told Reuters.
"Charging $100,000 is unsustainable. We need to be thinking about
getting prices down toward a half or a third of that, ideally even
less."
The call coincides with growing political pressure on the issue,
including an attack on high drug prices by U.S. President Donald
Trump.
Workman, whose institute has discovered 20 drug candidates since
2005, believes cancer drug prices have become disconnected from
economics as companies charge what the market will bear rather than
a price reflecting costs.
A principal justification for high prices is the financial burden of
running large clinical trials to secure regulatory approval. Yet
this increasingly does not apply in the case of modern cancer
therapies.
For example the registration study for Pfizer's targeted lung cancer
drug Xalkori required only 347 patients, while last year's extended
approval of the medicine to patients with mutations in the ROS1 gene
involved only 50 subjects.
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Workman, together with colleagues from the MD Anderson Cancer Center
in Texas and the Netherlands Cancer Institute, said the solution was
for an increasing proportion of drug developments to be driven by
academia.
To an extent that is already happening. Many of the latest advances
in cancer treatment originate in academic labs and there are now
nearly 150 academic drug discovery centers around the world, 80
percent of which develop oncology products.
Those academic centers should in future focus not only on getting
their discoveries to market but also on securing drug price caps as
part of their negotiations with commercial partners, the authors
said.
Increasing the scale and expertise of academic centers will take
time and money, but in the long term the new competition should also
help drive down prices in conventional pharma and biotech, they
said.
(Editing by Greg Mahlich)
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