Cancer patients will miss out on life-saving drugs as prices ‘spiral out of control’
Many new cancer drugs cost in excess of £80,000 per patient per year
CANCER patients will miss out on life-saving drugs because greedy drugs firms are hiking their prices to “what the market will bear”, according leading experts.
The Institute of Cancer Research says the amount charged by pharmaceutical companies does not reflect the costs involved in developing the products.
And they say the actions of the profit-seeking firms will lead to prices “spiralling” out of control.
Professor Paul Workman, chief executive of the ICR, said the cost of bringing drugs to market should be coming down as the size of clinical trials has got smaller.
Many therapies are also being used to treat conditions for which they were not initially developed, meaning costs should be shared.
But these savings are not being passed on to buyers, with many new cancer drugs costing in excess of £80,000 per patient per year.
Prices have been rising at around 10 per cent a year for around two decades – well above the rate of inflation - and levels that not sustainable.
This is particularly troublesome because many new cancer drugs are used in combination, meaning the total cost is far higher.
Writing in the journal Cell, Professor Workman said: “There is a clear and urgent necessity to lower cancer drug prices to keep lifesaving drugs available and affordable for patients.
“As one patient advocate recently put it: ‘Innovation is meaningless if nobody can afford it.’”
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence ruled last week that breast cancer patients should be denied palbociclib on the NHS because its £79,650 price tag is “too expensive”.
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The pill – described by a charity as “the closest thing these women would have to a cure in their lifetime” – can stall progression of the disease for over two years.
Universities – where a lot of medical research takes place – lack the resources or marketing expertise to take drugs to patients.
Instead they work with pharma companies to run clinical trial and navigate the regulatory system.
But Professor Workman says the firms also fail to pass on the saving that is made by adopting drugs when they have already been party developed.
He suggests more universities should be working with less profit-motivated companies to bring these pills to market.
That would allow them to agree to a price cap and lead to more patients getting the treatment they need.
Professor Workman said: “If we’re to end this era of $100,000 cancer drugs, we’re going to have to make some radical changes to the whole way drugs are discovered and developed.
“I believe the solution is for an increasing proportion of drug discovery to be driven forward by academic scientists, as is done at the ICR.
“And in addition we need academic organisations to become braver at moving new treatments into clinical trials and onto the market – increasingly by working in partnership with companies in creative new approaches rather than limiting their partnerships to the traditional pharmaceutical industry model.
“It’s important that in the new models we create we have sufficient expertise, experience and resources to ensure that drugs are progressed both intelligently and rapidly so that cancer patients can receive drugs as quickly as possible, as well as at affordable prices.”