Ontario approves second costly Hep C drug
With provincial approval of a second costly drug that can cure hepatitis C, Ottawa liver specialist Dr. Curtis Cooper is now expecting to see thousands of his patients cured of the disease that, without treatment, had the potential to destroy their lives.
The Ontario government agreed this week to pay for the drug Holkira Pak which, pharmaceutical company AbbVie says, had a 97 per cent cure rate in genotype 1 hepatitis C patients during clinical trials. It is the second hepatitis C drug the province has approved this year under the Ontario Drug Benefit exceptional access program. Earlier, the province agreed to pay for the drug Harvoni, which has a similar high cure rate for hepatitis C.
Both drugs cost in the $50,000 to $60,000 range, or more, which, until the province approved them, meant they were out of reach to most patients. Unlike previous treatments for hepatitis C, the drugs are easy to take in daily pill form, are well tolerated by patients and cure the disease in the vast majority of cases.
Their development and now approval has been called a landmark event in the lives of tens of thousands of Ontario residents suffering from hepatitis C.
“The Ontario government should be congratulated for making these funding decisions relatively quickly,” said Cooper, who is now in the position to see patients begin taking drugs that, in a matter of weeks, should cure their disease.
Cooper is director of the Ottawa Hospital and Regional Hepatitis Program, which treats about 5,000 patients from Ottawa, West Quebec, Eastern Ontario and Nunavut. Many of the clinic’s patients are in the correctional system.
There are approximately 15,000 people with hepatitis C in the Ottawa region.
So far, Cooper said, about 200 patients from the program have been treated with one of the drug regimes, most of them through clinical trials prior to provincial government approval.
About 60 per cent of the patient’s 5,000 patients, he added, should qualify for the drugs. The province has agreed to pay for anyone with at least Stage 2 fibrosis in their liver.
Cooper said patients are excited as well as anxious, because many remember previous treatments that sometimes made them sick. The new treatments are easy to take with few side effects, Cooper said.
With the advent of new drugs patients have “come out of the woodwork,” said Cooper. “It is a crushing workload these days, but it is gratifying that at every clinic we are now telling people they are cleared. These people have been living with this for decades.”
Cooper said he would like the province and drugs companies to work together to enable the province to fund the drug for everyone.
“Imagine the 35-year-old mother who wants to have her hepatitis C treated. I have to tell her I have great treatments, but I can’t offer them to you.”
Although the drugs are expensive, Cooper said treating patients early would “prevent all sorts of excess costs and human suffering down the road. When you treat somebody now for hepatitis C, they will likely never need a transplant, get cancer or get liver failure. Although the treatment is expensive, it is far more expensive to deal with these things later.”
“If we treat all hepatitis C patients now, we will reduce the need for transplantation.”