US oncologists call for government regulation to curb drug price rises.

The US government must act to curb the soaring cost of anticancer drugs, 118 US oncologists have argued in a commentary published on 23 July inMayo Clinic Proceedings. The authors include leading oncologists from such institutions as the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston,Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in NewYork City, and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. “High cancer drug prices are affecting the care of patients with cancer and our healthcare system,” said the lead author, Ayalew Tefferi, a hematologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “The average gross household income in the US is about $52 000 [£33 000; €47 000] per year. For an insured patient with cancer who needs a drug that costs $120 000 per year, the out-of-pocket expenses could be as much as $25 000 to $30 000—more than half their average household income.” The average price of new cancer drugs has risen between fivefold and 10-fold over 15 years to more than $100 000 a year in 2012, the oncologists wrote, and last year all new cancer drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration were priced above $120 000 for a year of use. As a result of these rising prices, the cost of drugs for each additional year lived rose from $54 000 in 1995 to $207 000 in 2013, they wrote. They added, “The good news is that effective new cancer therapies are being developed by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies at a faster rate than ever before. More than 900 new drugs are under development, many for rare cancers. Drug companies should be rewarded with reasonable profits for these efforts. The unfortunate news, also acknowledged by some of the pharmaceutical leadership, is that the current pricing system is unsustainable and not affordable for many patients.” The authors called for: • The creation of a post-FDA drug approval review mechanism to propose a “fair price for new treatments, based on the value to patients and health care”