Back stories here.British cancer patients will have to cough up £60,000 of their own money to access the latest raft of tyrosine kinase inhibitor treatments, a leading doctor has warned.
At least half a dozen breakthrough drugs due this year will prove too expensive for the National Health Service, Karol Sikora of Imperial College London writes in the latest issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine."
Over the next 12 months there will be at least six new, powerful targeted anti-cancer drugs administered as simple tablets for breast, lung, kidney and colorectal cancer," he said. "These drugs inhibit tyrosine kinases, a key signalling system in cells, and will cost at least £60,000 per patient per year.
It is unlikely the NHS will be able to afford any of them and in any case the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence's backlog will delay their assessment for at least a year."
He claimed that Roche's Avastin (bevacizumab) and Tarceva (erlotinib), GlaxoSmithKline's Tykerb and ImClone's Erbitux (cetuximab) would be some of the drugs under the spotlight.
Prof Sikora said that the spiralling costs of new cancer treatments meant the UK needed an urgent political debate about how it would be paid for. "Despite the £90 billion being spent in the NHS in 2007, which will rise to an expected £108 billion next year, UK service provision and technology still lagged behind its European neighbours," he noted.
"How much we are willing to pay for an extra year of good quality life with cancer is going to be a key question for the baby boomer generation," he concluded.
By Michael Day
Source: PharmaTimes
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