Cancer treatments "unaffordable" and will drive rapid transition to generics and market decline, says GlobalData

The rising prices of new cancer drugs are resulting in an increasing cost burden for patients and health care systems that does not necessarily correlate with the survival benefit the drug provides, and which is driving the rapid transition to generics and limiting the use of new market entrants, say analysts at research and consulting firm GlobalData.

With the vast majority of cancer drugs approved in 2012 costing over $100,000 per year of treatment, the life-extension of patients has quickly become prohibitively expensive, states Irfaan Dawood, an oncology analyst at GlobalData, noting: “From a decade ago, where it used to cost $5,000-$20,000 to prolong life for a year, we have reached a position where each incremental benefit in increasing overall survival or progression-free survival has become more costly and could soon become unaffordable.”

The comments come in response to a recent article published in the journal Blood, in which a consortium of physicians condemned the high prices of BCR-ABL tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) in the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML; The Pharma Letter April 26). The physicians argued that although innovation and discovery must be rewarded, the cost of care is spiralling out of control as the life expectancies of CML patients approach that of the normal population.