Tag Archives: drug cost

September 30, 2018 · 9:03 am

Money, Medicine, and Me


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In an article appearing on Medscape on September 13, a Reuters correspondent cited a recent study published in the Lancet looking at doctors who tweet. Although tweeting is a form of social media I have not embraced, I did participate in an attempt to study its use in the ASCO meetings in this article. However, the Medscape and Lancet articles did cause me to think about transparency in this blog.

I began blogging at the invitation of an internet company looking for physicians who would provide content they could use. When they were successful enough, they began using pharmaceutical advertising, and I left them, choosing to pay for my own web presence on wordpress.com. However, I now realize that I should also disclose my other relationships with pharmaceutical companies. In the Medscape article, there is a reference to a government website where you can look up the payments and transactions I have with pharmaceutical companies. What it does not reveal is the nature of those transactions which I will herewith share.

In doing drug development, pharmaceutical companies rely on [mostly] academic physicians to perform clinical trials. These activities may involve grants to study drugs in the laboratory, grants to their institutions to offset the cost of data managers, IRB costs, and reimbursement for travel to discuss the ongoing trial or its publication with other physician/researchers. In the past, I have had support in all of these categories, most notably (in terms of career influences) in the development of leuprolide, the first new drug approved for treating prostate cancer in many decades back in ~1985. It was an amazing opportunity for a young faculty member to treat the first patients in the world with a new drug, eventually present the findings to the FDA, publish the results, and then participate in teaching the medical community about its use.

Since then, the landscape of disclosure has changed for the better. Now when my colleagues and I give presentations or publish articles we sign disclosure agreements revealing which companies we consult for, and there are annual reporting requirements to our academic institutions. In my case, the current companies I have consulting relationships with include Janssen (abiraterone, apalutamide), Bayer (rogaratinib), and Seattle Genetics (enfortumab vedotin). I also have founded (and have ownership interests in) Aurora Oncology, ProTechSure, and Gonex/Cedus, three startup companies attempting to move drugs we have worked on in my laboratory to the clinic. None of these relationships involve giving promotional talks, using company slides in education, or advocating for the drugs on this blog or elsewhere. For the large commercial companies they involve insuring patient safety in ongoing trials as an independent monitor.

I have expressed my concerns about the rapid increase in medical costs for cancer care here and here. I do not have a solution for this intrinsically difficult challenge in our capitalistic system, and I realize that my own consulting and entrepreneurial activities ultimately add to those costs. Indeed, the costs of prostate cancer detection and treatment in men over 70 is 1.2 Billion dollars every 3 years. The newest targeted agents and immuno-oncology agents are phenomenally expensive, often in the $8-10,000/month range which can result in severe economic distress even for those patients who have co-pay supplemental insurance. Eventually, American medicine, with all of its amazing basic science and translational science (bench to bedside research) will need to find a balance between the profit motives that drive innovation and the altruistic care that medicine embodies in its most noble applications. What is an extra 3 months of life worth, and what toxicities (economic or clinical) are acceptable to pay for that? We need to have honest discussions as a society, and importantly, with our own families about these questions, especially when we are facing the diminishing benefits of aggressive/expensive care in terminal illnesses.

 

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November 8, 2015 · 9:33 pm

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??

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August 9, 2015 · 8:50 pm

Support the petition for reasonable drug prices.


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I hereby confess that when it comes to healthcare, I am somewhat of a socialist. I feel healthcare should be a right, not a privilege. However, I would draw some sort of line for certain conditions, even including cancer. For example, there is little evidence that 3rd or 4th line therapies for many cancers have any significant impact on survival, yet we often prescribe them for patients who are healthy enough to try them with the rationale that “even a 5% chance” is worth taking. Weighing that 5% chance against a 25% chance of causing further toxicity and NOT improving someone’s quality of life requires sensitive counseling and is part of the “art” of practicing medical oncology. We already don’t pay for cosmetic surgery when it comes to face-lifts, but breast cancer patients enjoy coverage for breast reconstruction, while men with erectile dysfunction following surgery or radiation don’t have coverage in most instances for ED drugs or other treatments. Thus, there is a lot of room for improvement in our health care system. The ACA is not the best answer, but it may provide at least a start through inclusion of coverage for end-of-life counseling and funding of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. We should not tolerate having the most expensive health care system on the planet that delivers care that ranks dead last in the developed world.

One of the most disturbing trends in our broken health care system has been the introduction of numerous new cancer drugs that have (in some cases) remarkable activity but are priced beyond any reasonable value consideration. Trying to decide about “value” itself is an extremely challenging undertaking. Numerous articles like this one have proposed guidelines through which value might be better quantified. Now a group of oncology physicians have published a position statement regarding cancer drug costs that deserves your attention. They propose a number of solutions that could help the cancer community move toward the kind of progress made by the AIDS community when they were faced with similar challenges of highly expensive drugs. You should read the whole article to see the context, but their enumerated suggestions are as follows:

If you agree that these actions should become a part of our national discussion, please join me in signing the petition these thoughtful oncology leaders have started. You can click on this link to sign up, and please invite your friends to join you.

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