2018 Cancer Cure: Doctors 'Pissed Off' as Cancer Drug Makers Triple Price of $148K Pills
A drug used to treat a range of white blood cancers costs around $148,000 a year for a treatment course. Oncologists and doctors were just about to establish a way to help patients save on drug costs by a new dosage regimen until drug manufacturers tripled the price of the pills.
Before pharma companies Janssen and Pharmacyclics came up with their new scheme, patients suffering from mantle cell lymphoma and related white blood cell cancers took up to four pills a day of ibrutinib, brand name Imbruvica, as Ars Technica noted.
Doctors found that they could lessen the side-effects of the drug, which include diarrhea, body pain, and tiredness, by limiting the dose of the drug. In 2017, experts were able to demonstrate in a pilot trial that adjusting the regimen from three pills a day to just one a day would work just as well in managing cancer. Each 140mg pill costs about $133.
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A huge bonus for the new dosage, aside from freeing patients from the unpleasant side-effects of the drugs, was the potential savings for a patient. A cancer sufferer taking one pill a day instead of three could save them around $50,000 a year in medication costs.
The makers of the drugs, of course, are not having that. Janssen and Pharmacyclics were quick to secure approval to revamp the drug to varying doses for each pill, from 140 mg for the weakest pill to 560 mg for the strongest.
All of the new pills will be the same price, regardless of strength. At around $400 each, this basically triples the price of the old pill, for the same effect.
So while doctors might still be able to lower dosages by having their patients take the weaker pills, there would now be any savings for the patients at all after this scheme. What's more, the companies will stop making the original 140 mg pills within the next three months, too.
It was a move by the pharma companies that did not sit well with doctors.
"That got us kind of pissed off," Mark J. Ratain, an oncologist at the University of Chicago Medicine, noted.
"We were just in the early stages of planning [a clinical trial] and getting it organized, and thinking about sample size and funding, and we caught wind of what the company was doing," Ratain added, as quoted by the Washington Post.
Meanwhile, Janssen and Pharmacyclics were calling the new and pricey pills an innovation for cancer patients.
The $400 pills are their "new innovation to provide patients with a convenient one pill, once-a-day dosing regimen and improved packaging, with the intent to improve adherence to this important therapy," as a statement from the company read.
Sandy Walsh, a representative for the Food and Drugs Authority, said that the agency is now looking into these concerns.
