Indian government likely to slash prices for cancer and cardiac drugs

India's war on drug prices has been pushed up another notch. Given that the list of drugs under price control has steadily expanded from 74 in 1995 to nearly 860 by 2019, the prevailing mood of the government is to further bring down prices. The price of drugs used to treat cancer and cardiac issues could soon face the axe, reports The Pharma Letter’s India correspondent.

The government is also said to be eager, for the first time ever, to revise the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM) based on therapies like oncology, diabetes, anti-infectives, cardiology, respiratory illness, etc, on the lines of the WHO recommendation and to expand the purview of 'essential medicines' and make them affordable.

Addressing scarcity of some first-line antibiotics, a shortlist of essential medicines has been drawn out by a committee headed by Balram Bhargava, Secretary in the Department of Health Research. Along with the Indian Council of Medical Research, the duo has been mandated to decide which drugs need to be available in adequate numbers across the country.