Germany's vfa latest to round on $648 million cancer drug R&D cost figure

Anger has been stirred up by a Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) article on the estimated research and development (R&D) spending for developing a cancer drug that potentially makes a mockery of previous claims from pharma on how much the process costs.

In the report, by US medics Vinay Prasad and Sham Mailankody, an analysis is performed of US Securities and Exchange Commission filings for 10 cancer drugs to come up with a median cost of developing a single cancer drug. The figure arrived at is $648 million.

This not only is a lot lower than the median revenue for such a drug, quoted by the report as $1.66 billion, but is also less than a quarter of the $2.7 billion sum often cited by industry of how much it costs to produce a medication to fight cancer.