Prices Soar for Cancer Drugs

These so-called "smart drugs" focus their effects on specific, identifiable processes occurring within cancer cells. The new drugs are highly promising in that they "sometimes" provide benefit to patients who have failed traditional therapies. However, "they do not work for everyone, they often have unwanted side effects, and they are all extremely expensive." Patients, physicians, insurance carriers, and the FDA are all calling for the discovery of "predictive tests" that allow for rational and cost-effective use of these drugs.

There was a new EGFRx assay (a predictive test) developed that holds the key to solving some of the problems confronting this high-price healthcare system that is seeking ways to best allocate available resources while accomplishing the critical task of matching individual patients with the treatments most likely to benefit them. Not only is it an important predictive test, it is also a unique tool that can help to identify newer and better drugs, evaluate promising drug combinations, and serve as a "gold standard" correlative model with which to develop new DNA, RNA, and protein-based tests that better predict for drug activity.

But how does one get ASCO and others to understand this and allow its judicious use? They have single-handedly done more over the past 20 years to keep assay-testing (pre-testing) technology under a bushel basket and out of the public light. It has hurt literally hundreds of thousands of patients. We'd be much further along and technology would have improved, even more accurate. New treatments would have been discovered and targeted immediately to the people who could most benefit from them. This has been one great lost of opportunity in clinical cancer research.

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