Cancer Cure: Expenses on Cancer Treatments Continue to Rise; New Cure Found for Mesothelioma
Cancer treatments are so ridiculously expensive that worldwide spending on the critical illness has reached past $100 billion over the last five years. Now, there is a new drug that allegedly cures some types of cancer.
According to a report by QuintilesIMS Institute, they have found out that expenses on cancer drugs and medications have grown from $91 billion in 2012 to $113 billion last year. Moreover, the publication predicts that it will continue to grow between 6 to 9 percent yearly through 2021.
The extra money received by hospital organizations, however, are used to find and test new drugs that would help extend cancer patients' lives.
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Recently, Express reported that a new drug has been discovered to treat mesothelioma, one of the world's deadliest types of cancer.
Mesothelioma, in a nutshell, is a cancer caused by exposure to asbestos, which used to be a common building material. It affects the lungs, as well as the lining that surrounds the lower digestive tract. Since the 1970s, the number of those affected by the illness has increased six times. It is said to be a difficult cancer to cure, but now, a new drug is reportedly being tested on 300 patients in the U.K.
The said drug is called nivolumab, a type of immunotherapy which has been known to be an effective treatment for melanoma as well as kidney cancer which, according to Medical Xpress, is the most common type of cancer.
"The UK has one of the world's highest incidences of mesothelioma and currently there aren't many ways to treat it," according to Gareth Griffiths, a professor in the University of Southampton.
"Boosting the immune system by releasing killer T-cells that have previously been blocked could offer us a new way to treat more patients with this devastating disease."
The report on QuintilesIMS Institute, as previously mentioned, also stated that the use of targeted immunotherapy drugs, which uses the body's own immune system to fight cancer, have made a great, positive change in cancer treatment in the past decade.
