Global spending on cancer drugs climbs to $100b
NEW GENERATION OF TREATMENTS CARRIES ASTRONOMICAL PRICE TAGS
Global annual spending on cancer drugs has hit $100 billion (Dh367 billion) for the first time as the pharmaceuticals industry prepares to launch a fresh generation of treatments that promise to push costs even higher.
The record 2014 figure marks a 10 per cent increase from a year earlier, largely due to rising drug prices and increased incidence of cancer. The data — from the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, a respected US research organisation — comes at a time of growing excitement among medics and investors over new cancer drugs heralded as the biggest step forward in oncology for decades.
Merck & Co, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Roche and AstraZeneca are among those developing socalled cancer immunotherapies that harness the body’s immune system to fight tumours.
The earliest of these have been launched in the US in recent months at prices amounting to about $150,000 a year — generating fresh optimism around the pharmaceuticals industry after a decade of sluggish growth.
However, the expected surge of expensive new cancer drugs has raised questions over their affordability for health care systems already struggling with the rising cost of caring for an ageing world population.
“Earlier diagnosis, longer treatment duration and increased effectiveness of drug therapies are contributing to rising levels of spending on medicines for cancer,” said the IMS report. The compound annual growth rate in cancer drug spending increased to 6.5 per cent over the past five years and this was forecast by IMS to rise further to 6-8 per cent between now and 2018 as new treatments arrive.
Change landscape
“New therapeutic classes and combination therapies will change the cancer landscape over the next several years,” the report said.
A scramble for high-margin cancer assets has been a factor in the mergers and acquisitions boom across the pharmaceuticals sector, including AbbVie’s $21 billion takeover in March of Pharmacyclics, maker of a fastgrowing blood cancer drug.
“The strong pipeline of medicines in clinical development suggests that direct competition will increase in the next five years,” said IMS. “Certain tumours, such as non-small cell lung cancer, will become battlegrounds, with multiple classes and multiple products within classes competing.”
Average per capita spending on cancer drugs was highest in the US at $99 in 2014, up from $71 in 2010, but the biggest increase was in the UK where it rose 67 per cent over the period to just over $40.
Rising incidence of cancer poses a big policy challenge for global health systems as populations age.
The number of over-65s on the planet is projected almost to triple between 2010 and 2050 to 1.5 billion, according to the UN. This, in turn, will spur a 70 per cent increase in cancer incidence over the next 20 years, according to the World Health Organisation.