Prostate Drug Costs

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Most readers will have seen something in the popular press over the last 6 months regarding the increasing awareness of oncology drug costs. For example, there have been very nice commentaries in the New England Journal of Medicine like this one, that deals with the cost of nivolumab, a PD-1 pathway inhibitor that is approved for treating melanoma and may show promise in a number of other cancers like kidney cancer. The final paragraph is telling:

Hand clapping for science is now inextricably linked to hand wringing over affordability. Drug prices are increasing more rapidly than their benefits, and the growth in spending on drugs has started to outstrip growth in other areas of health care. Addressing this problem requires realizing that cost-effectiveness assessment — a step that we are not even ready for in the United States — has limitations when one considers the price of the comparator and the impact on overall budgets.

I have opined elsewhere in this blog site on the excitement over the new immune-stimulating drugs that show promise. Indeed, some may be able to improve the response to prostate vaccine approaches. The question is whether we can afford all of these drugs, who decides, how they decide, and what methods they use. In the past, a QALY (quality adjusted life year) has been used to benchmark some of the things we do in medicine. In a nice NEJM perspective article, the classic “$50,000/QALY” benchmark was reviewed, but the authors suggested that given medical progress and inflation, a more realistic number might be as high as $100,000 or $150,000. The costs of the newer prostate cancer drugs such as abiraterone, enzalutamide, sipuleucel-T, cabazitaxel etc. have not escaped attention. Medscape had an article on this over 2 years ago. I am no expert on Markov models, differing ways to evaluate cost-effectiveness, and the economics of medicine. But as a simple way of explaining the challenge, how much is cisplatin, a cornerstone of curative treatment for testis cancer, the number one cancer of young men in their 20’s worth? If you can answer that, then how much would it be worth if you were using the same drug as a third line to treat prostate cancer, where responses are rare except in the case of the small cell variant, but no one is cured? In the case of the young testis cancer patient, many years (or QALY’s) are achieved while in the case of even the “sensitive” form of prostate cancer, the benefit would be in months at best. Should testis cancer patients have to pay huge sums because it works so well for them and prostate cancer patients less? And how do we figure in the drug development costs in a fair way that retains a financial incentive for the pharmaceutical companies and researchers to keep working for new discoveries?

Added to this is my own experience when I have described using a highly expensive (sometimes toxic) drug to a patient with well-known, very limited (but measurable, approved, and “covered” by Medicare or insurance) benefit. Often when I am honest and say, “this may help for a while, but is not a cure,” to a patient who may have very few symptoms at all but is progressing based on a rising PSA, the reply will be “what choice do I have”? That is a great question. If someone else is paying for some very expensive drug, why not try it? Although I know that the ethicists feel “my wishful answer” is unethical, I would like to be able to say something like this: “Well Mr. Smitherton, Medicare has decided that if you would rather take the money and apply it to your grandchild’s college fund, they will be willing to divert the costs (or some proportion of them) to that cause because ‘we’ [society] feel that should be your choice, rather than having us pay for a relatively ineffective, expensive drug if you don’t think it is worth it, or if you value his/her education over a few months of additional life span.” If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. And if I was qualified in ethics, I would probably not be writing this. That’s my 2¢ – or maybe it should be my $20,000??