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New cancer immunotherapies such as checkpoint inhibitors are showing success in treating cancer, but can cost well over $100,000 a year:
Newer cancer drugs that enlist the body's immune system are improving the odds of survival, but competition between them is not reining in prices that can now top $250,000 a year.
The drugs' success for patients is the result of big bets in cancer therapy made by Bristol-Myers Squibb Co, Merck & Co Inc and Roche Holding AG, among others in big pharma. The industry's pipeline of cancer drugs expanded by 63 percent between 2005 and 2015, according to the QuintilesIMS Institute, and a good number are reaching the market.
The global market for cancer immunotherapies alone is expected to grow more than fourfold globally to $75.8 billion by 2022 from $16.9 billion in 2015, according to research firm GlobalData.
[...] "Competition is key to lowering drug prices," Trump told pharmaceutical executives at an Oval Office meeting in January.
But that is not happening with new drugs called checkpoint inhibitors that work by releasing a molecular brake, allowing the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells the same way it fights infections caused by bacteria or viruses.
For cancers like melanoma, the treatments can mean long-term survival for around 20 percent of patients.
Bristol's Yervoy, first approved in 2011, targets a protein known as CTLA-4. Other immunotherapies, including Bristol's Opdivo, Keytruda from Merck, Roche's Tecentriq, and Pfizer Inc's Bavencio, involve a different protein called PD-1.
Other targets are being explored. Some new data will be presented this week in Washington at the American Association for Cancer Research's annual meeting.
Current checkpoint inhibitors each have a list price near $150,000 a year. A combination of Yervoy and Opdivo, approved by the Food and Drug Administration for advanced or inoperable melanoma, has a cost of $256,000 a year for patients who respond to the treatment.
Similar immunotherapies are in development at companies like AstraZeneca Plc (AZN.L). Merck, which declined to comment on pricing plans, expects an FDA decision by May 10 on its combination of Keytruda and chemotherapy as an initial treatment for the most common form of lung cancer - by far the biggest market for cancer drugs.
Pfizer said Bavencio, cleared by the FDA earlier this month to treat Merkel cell carcinoma, a rare type of skin cancer, has a price "comparable to other checkpoint inhibitors approved for different indications."
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday April 04 2017, @07:26PM (3 children)
In many cases, there's only a shortage of cash to pay for treatment if the treatment in question costs as much as its creator would like to be paid. Whereas if we used available mechanisms to reduce the cost of treatment to at or near the actual cost of creating said treatment, that cost could be much lower, meaning more people could be treated.
You seem to have a poor grasp on what money actually is. Head over to mises.org and school up a bit. Hint: the TLDR; version is cash is a claim on resources so lack of cash is generally equal to a lack of resources.
Now as for the rest, the problem is that the creator is seeking not seeking to recover the cost of producing an incremental dose, they need to recover the initial investment and produce a return to the investors who loaned them the money to cover not only the successful drugs but even the failures. So yes you could vote to have the government seize the means of production for an already existing drug and make it essentially cost the price of producing it and then yes everybody who needs it could probably have it. But there would be no more new drugs. Ever. Maybe you think that exchange is worth it, I don't.
I see it as any other good offered in the marketplace. I have a problem, one or more people offer to solve it and I decide who, if any, gets the money. Everybody dies, so decide how much value you place on a few more years. Then we as a society have to decide how much WE will spend on a few extra years for someone who can't pay. The profit maximizing price will always prevail and the trend is usually to sell more product at a lower unit price over time.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday April 04 2017, @08:02PM (2 children)
I agree with the idea that money is a claim on somebody else's resources.
I'm with you so far.
Here's the question: How much of a return needs to be produced here? If they sold off bonds, then the answer is of course determined by the bond. If they borrowed from a bank of some kind, then their agreement with the bank determines that.
But that doesn't cover everything, because of stocks. And the company is legally obligated to make the return for stockholders as large as they possibly can. Which means that if they can charge customers more and get, say, a 25% ROI rather than not overcharge them and get a 7% ROI, they are required to charge more, never mind that increasing the price harms all their customers.
Normally, this gets solved by 3 forces: competition, substitute inferior goods, and doing without the product. The possibility of substitution and doing without create price elasticity, which determines the demand curve. And of course competition puts a check on the ability to overcharge because another company might offer the same product for less cost. But those don't work here because (a) patents mean there's no competition, (b) malpractice demands of best possible care means there's no substituting inferior goods, and (c) the fact that your life depends on it means there's no doing without the product.
In this case, the profit-maximizing price is: Every cent the patient has available now and can ever come up with for the rest of their life, because again none of the forces that would normally prevent this apply.
If I understand your argument, it basically boils down to this: If you're poor, and get sick or injured, your advice is for them to drop dead immediately. I'd much rather live in a society where pharmaceutical stockholders don't get as much of a return as they might like than a society where a broken leg is a death sentence for a poor person.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday April 04 2017, @08:56PM (1 child)
You are saying some really nasty things about yourself and your world view. So you believe, and project upon everyone else, that they are so desperate to live another year they would spend the inheritance of their children, perhaps even sell their children themselves? in a pointless effort to buy a product that didn't even exist a year ago and might not even work. Humm. Ok. And I'm the selfish uncaring bastard here. All righty then!
If a product is going to be a success it has to eventually be affordable by enough people to maximize profit. Why is this a difficult concept?
And it is cheap virtue signaling to say you are for lower returns for pharma stocks but if you had a brain you would understand the problem with that is that if pharma stocks consistently have substandard returns investors will put their money elsewhere and there won't BE pharma stocks anymore. And if they return "too much" consistently it is called a "bubble" and self corrects after a crash. The market works. It works far better than your socialism in providing plenty for all. Capitalism and the market have worked every time they have been allowed to exist and socialism has failed every time it has been tried. Some people aren't swayed by evidence, it is a religious question for them and apparently you are one of those people.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday April 04 2017, @10:40PM
You mean evidence like this [who.int], showing that many countries with socialist government-run health care systems get substantially better patient outcomes at about half the cost? Or for that matter, the evidence from numerous sources that those socialists in Cuba get approximately the same patient outcomes as the US for 1/20th of the cost that the US pays?
I don't think it's me who is ignoring evidence here.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.