A newly approved chemotherapy drug will cost about $30,000 a month, a sign that the prices of cancer medicines are continuing to rise despite growing concern about health care costs.
The price of the new drug, called Folotyn, is at least triple that of other drugs that critics have said are too expensive for the benefits they offer to patients. The colon cancer drug Erbitux, for instance, costs $10,000 a month and the drug Avastin about $8,800 when used to treat lung cancer. The price of Folotyn "seems way higher than I heard of before," Robert L. Erwin, president of the Marti Nelson Cancer Foundation, a patient advocacy group. "I can't imagine there not being a backlash against the pricing."
Drug makers in general have been raising prices sharply in advance of the possible passage of health care overhaul legislation, according to various studies. But the price of cancer drugs has been an issue for several years.
Critics, including many oncologists, say that patients and the health system cannot afford to pay huge prices for drugs that, on average, provide only a few extra months of life at best.
And Folotyn has not even been shown to prolong lives — only to shrink tumors. The drug was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in late September as a treatment for peripheral T-cell lymphoma, a rare and usually aggressive blood cancer that strikes an estimated 5,600 Americans each year. It is available for sale, but its manufacturer, Allos Therapeutics, does not plan to start actively promoting it until January.
Allos defends the price, saying it made a significant investment to develop the first approved drug for this type of cancer.
"It's a very aggressive disease, and patients right now have no options," said James V. Caruso, the chief commercial officer for Allos, a 17-year-old publicly traded company based in Westminster, Colo., that has no other drugs on the market.
Mr. Caruso also said the price of Folotyn was not out of line with that of other drugs for rare cancers. Patients, moreover, are likely to use the drug for only a couple of months because the tumor worsens so quickly, he said. So the total cost of using Folotyn will be less than for many other drugs with lower monthly prices.
"We believe we are fairly priced," he added, "and we're benchmarked" against other drugs. In a conference call with analysts last month, Mr. Caruso said Allos had "not had pushback of any type at this point" from insurers.
Some drugs for rare cancers are close to Foltyn's price. Genzyme's Clolar for pediatric leukemia costs about $34,000 a week, though the company says that only two weeks of treatment are typically needed. Genzyme's drug Campath, for chronic lymphocytic leukemia, costs about $5,000 a week for several weeks.
GlaxoSmithKline is charging up to $98,000 for a six-month treatment course of Arzerra, a drug approved in late October for chronic lymphocytic leukemia, which strikes about 15,000 Americans a year. About $60,000 of the cost would be incurred in the first eight weeks, when the drug is given more frequently.
More ...
