Cancer Drug Prices Continue to Rise

By Kevin E. Noonan --

Rising drug prices is an issue that everyone from the President to both Houses of Congress (Democrats and Republicans), Wall Street, and Main Street can agree must be alleviated, and perhaps the most expensive drugs are those that treat cancer.  This reality is a combination of the severity of the disease and the nature of the drugs, which are generally biologic drugs characterized by structural complexity, production difficulties, and high cost of regulatory approval.  As reported in Genetic Engineering News, the trend of increasing drug prices continued in 2018 among most of the top ten highest selling cancer drugs currently on the market.

The basis for the information disclosed in GEN is a report from IQVIA™ Institute for Human Data Science entitled Global Oncology Drug Trends 2018, which showed that cancer treatment costs average over $150,000 on 2017 with total spend in the U.S. in these drugs of almost $50 billion (compared with a total of $60 billion for the rest of the world).  The situation may get even worse, with cancer drug prices expected to double again by 2022 in the U.S. and there being an equivalent percentage rise (10-13% annually) in the rest of the world.

Details of these drugs are provided in the table below.

Note: 2018 Sales and 2017 Sales are in billions.

Comments

[Paul F. Morgan]

An example of the negative media coverage of the pharma industry in the U.S.: Joe Nocera: "Why Big Pharma Is Winning the Drug Price Wars" (Bloomberg) [That report seems to even suggest marketing obfuscation and/or antitrust issues?]
Of patent concern, this kind of publicity seems likely to reduce the traditional pro-patent-law lobbying effectiveness of this industry.

[Skeptical]

Mr. Morgan,

Another example of "pro-patent" lobbying that reduces rather than benefits the overall view of patents can be seen in the Pharma efforts to eliminate or control natural secondary markets in the cross-border sense AFTER the patent holder has already achieved their benefit of a first sale - and the Big Pharma attempts to play a geographic sales game, which only make the average US citizen a de facto supporter of Big Pharma profit levels and artificially reduced prices in the foreign markets.

This aspect DOES circle back into the thread above, as Big Pharma allows itself to be negotiated INTO those "regulat[ed] drug prices by reference to an international index based on government-negotiated drug prices abroad" POSSIBILITY as is noted on a new post at: https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2019/04/28/accelerating-generic-entry-proven-solution-problem-prescription-drug-pricing/id=108586/