A group of 100 leukemia doctors are coming together and posing an ethical question to large pharmaceutical companies: is it fair to charge more than $100,000 a year for cancer therapy when it costs far less than that to manufacture and keeps patients from getting life-saving treatment?
The doctors, who specialize in chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), published a detailed editorial in the medical journal Blood on Friday that criticize pharmaceutical charge far more than they are objectively worth, knowing that patients have no other choice than to pay the prices they dictate. The costs of cancer drugs vary widely by region and the free market economy has not helped lower prices.
The authors acknowledged that as pharmaceutical companies, they have the right to make a profit, but questioned how much leeway they are given in setting the prices of new cancer medicines and whether pricing practices harm patients and health-care systems.
"Of the 12 drugs approved by the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) for various cancer indications in 2012, 11 were priced above $100,000 per year. Cancer drug prices have almost doubled from a decade ago, from an average of $5,000 per month to more than $10,000 per month," the doctors wrote.
"Hopes that the fundamentals of a free market economy and market competition will settle cancer drug prices at lower levels have not been fulfilled," they noted.
The study goes on to make a case study of the popular drug imantinib, marketed as Gleevec in the United States and Glivec in other parts of the world, as a key drug with a rising price tag that brought its maker, Novartis, $4.7 billion in revenue last year.
"Being one of the most successful cancer targeted therapies, imatinib may have set the pace for the rising cost of cancer drugs," the letter said.
Its price at the time of release in 2001 was $30,000 per year, but by 2012 had risen to $92,000 per year in the United States "despite the fact that all research costs were accounted for in the original proposed price."
