Cashed out on cancer cure
THEY are the breakthrough medicines turning cancer from a death sentence into a chronic disease — but only one in five Australians who need them are getting them.
High-cost immunotherapy treatments that use the body’s own immune system to fight cancer are being used by just 1500 of the 7500 cancer patients who could benefit, according to a new report.
Patients, cancer groups, clinicians and pharmaceutical companies will today meet politicians in Canberra to call for changes to Australia’s regulatory and medical subsidy schemes to fast-track access to the medicines.
They want medicine approval bodies to stop classifying cancers according to the body part they emerge in and instead classify them by their genetic signature, as the US Food and Drug Administration has done.
This would open up treatments to many thousands of patients currently denied help.
Currently someone with melanoma, lung cancer or kidney cancer can get a subsidised immunotherapy treatment, but if they have adenocarcinoma, Merkel cell carcinoma or other cancer types the treatment is not subsidised.
“It’s irrelevant to talk about body parts when you are talking about the future of cancer medicines,” says former Cancer Council chief Professor Ian Olver, who now works at the Sansom Institute for Health Research.
Pharmaceutical company Merck Sharp & Dohme has commissioned a Deloitte Access Economics report that shows in Australia immunotherapies are approved for five cancer types, well short of the 11 in the US and the six approved in Europe.
Only three of the immunotherapies in Australia are subsidised by the PBS and the high cost of the other two — $80,000-$100,000 a year — means that most patients can’t afford them.
Four patients interviewed by the report authors are having to self-fund their treatment because it is not subsidised in Australia.
Jonathan (surname suppressed) said he was paying close to $100,000 for his treatment for Merkel cell carcinoma while the person with melanoma next to him in hospital was paying $37 through the PBS.
Medicine Australia analysis has found the average time to listing a cancer medicine on the PBS is 597 days, 200 days longer than in any other disease area.
Clinical trials have started for immunotherapies on more than 30 different cancer types.
Many Australian patients are not offered cancer treatments because their doctors are unaware they are available or don’t mention them because they think the patient can’t afford them.