Anti-cancer drugs: a vulture's speculation

Skyrocketing prices, and not justified by research expenditures. Therapeutic advances are significant, the profits understandable, but the costs to patients are completely unjustified.

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Cost of anticancer drugs

ANTI-CANCER DRUGS

Anti-cancer drugs continue to multiply. But with the number of products, not always effective and useful for any reason, prices and speculation also multiply. According to Professor Roberto Burioni, science is reaching the match point against cancer, developing drugs that are able to achieve good results even against tumors considered hopeless for the patient, such as pancreatic cancer.

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COST OF ANTI-CANCER DRUGS

So much for the good news about cancer drugs; now let's move on to the bad. News that reeks of waste, speculation, and harm to the most vulnerable patients. The number one waste, even before money, for Italian patients concerns: the approval times of an anticancer drug, as reported by Favo, the Federation of associations that carry out voluntary work in the oncology sector, chaired by Professor Francesco De Lorenzo. On average, An Italian patient must wait 806 days to be able to purchase a drug authorised by the EMA, and in some regions (obviously in the South) it can take up to three years.Delays on the part of both regional administrations and the usual Italian Medicines Agency (AIFA), which is repeating, on a national level, what the EMA has already done on a European level. The result: in Italy, people die before they die of cancer because they wait for the drug that can cure it.

As for speculation, let's say that here too, as with research, there is no stopping for a second, with the danger however of short-circuiting the national health care system (perhaps this is also why the regions are delaying the release of new drugs) and family budgets (overall Italians spend over 4 billion a year on anti-tumor drugs).

The paradox, only apparent since it is a speculation, lies in the fact that The more drugs are discovered, the higher the prices of these medicines on the global market., as impressive statistics demonstrate. In 2004, the total cost of cancer drugs was $24 billion. (approximately 21,7 billion euros); in 2008 it reached 40 billion, in 2014 80 billion, out of the total 650 billion spent on drugs.

Meanwhile, while the EMA (European Medicines Agency) examines around forty antiviral drugs every year, granting marketing authorisation to almost all of them, the cost of a significant oncological therapy has exceeded the threshold of 100 thousand eurosA wild speculation, which has nothing to do with the profits that the producers rightly deserve, has now overwhelmed the market of anti-cancer drugs.

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HOW CANCER DRUGS ARE PRICES CREATED

How do these crazy prices arise? Certainly not because of research and development, which until recently were the determining factor in the cost of a medicinal. Now instead Research accounts for just 15 percent of the overall cost, while marketing can account for up to 30 percent.The more medicines are needed, the greater speculation and waste become.

In the lucid madness of the prices of anticancer drugs there is not only the ruthless logic of the market. There is even the usual unbearable discrimination between those who can and those who can'tIn Italy, in fact, anticancer drugs are part of the medicines offered by the National Health Service with the corresponding co-pay (while in America, cancer patients can go bankrupt). But if the drug isn't available, while waiting for local authorizations, what do those with the money do? They go to another European country and buy the new anticancer drugs. The others wait and maybe die.

It goes without saying that with the lengthening of life and the improvement of therapies, always first and foremost thanks to new lifestyles, there is only one way to withstand the shock wave of demand for new anticancer drugs prescribed by the National Health Service: recover resources by reducing waste, still enormous, in other areasAn example? It would be enough to reduce diagnostic tests (Italy holds the European record) and certain surgical procedures, which are completely unnecessary and sometimes simply the result of the incompetence of some professionals. This is the way out of the tunnel of injustice, even in cancer: less waste for everyone, and more money for those who truly need it.

American scientists speak out against drug speculation

A few years ago it caused a sensation the open letter of 100 of the most famous American oncologists, published in the journal B, which denounced "speculation and profiteering" by some pharmaceutical companies, with the complicity of health authorities, ready to market new products at ever-increasing prices. The scientists cited the case of as many as 12 anticancer drugs that saw their prices rise just one year after being approved and launched onto the market. And they never stopped.

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