Cancer drug firms ‘double the price for NHS patients’
PATIENTS are being denied cancer drugs because manufacturers have increased prices, research shows.
In some cases companies are charging the NHS twice as much as other countries for the same treatment, academics found.
Only this month, health chiefs removed 16 medicines from the Cancer Drugs Fund because they were deemed too expensive.
These included a life- extending pill for breast cancer, lapatinib, and a form of chemotherapy for leukaemia called dasatinib.
In the UK, the price for the breast cancer treatment is set at £24,000 per patient a year, while in Thailand it is available for the equivalent sum of £11,600.
Similarly the leukaemia drug dasatinib costs £22,100 in the UK – but is £10,100 in Brazil.
However, it is not just the less developed countries that are paying much lower prices for the same drugs.
Researchers from Liverpool University found that the UK is paying £20,900 for another leukaemia drug – imatinib – compared to £18,800 in France and just £5,500 in Russia.
And sorafenib, a liver cancer treatment, costs £37,500 in the UK but £32,600 in Spain and £29,200 in France.
The findings will add to concerns that cancer patients are being denied the most effective treatments because drugs firms are overly obsessed with their profits.
Earlier this year the pharmaceutical industry took legal action against the Government. The drugs companies were unhappy about arrangements forcing them to pay money back to the Department of Health if the total NHS drugs bill exceeds £10billion. Liverpool University academic Dr Andrew Hill, who will unveil his findings next week at the European Cancer Conference in Vienna, warned that British patients were being short-changed.
‘Some of the drugs which have been recently removed
‘Making vast profits’
from the Cancer Drugs Fund are actually very cheap to manufacture, and are being sold in other countries at prices much lower than the UK,’ he said.
‘If these cancer drugs could be introduced to the UK at these lower prices, they would be affordable and patients could benefit from them.
‘For example dasatinib, used to treat leukaemia, is being sold in Brazil at less than half the UK price, and the cost price of production is 99 per lower than the UK price.’
Dr Hill pointed out that prices were ‘flexible’ and could be easily lowered by drugs firms if they so wished.
‘What doesn’t seem to come out is that the price is a flexible concept and prices can come down,’ he said.
‘The pharmaceutical companies who developed these drugs are making vast profits every year, and so could afford to sell their drugs more cheaply. The majority of spending from pharmaceutical companies is on advertising and marketing, not on R&D as they claim. So the normal justification that high drug prices are required to sustain high R&D costs is hard to defend.’ This month the NHS announced it would remove 16 treatments from those usually provided by the Cancer Drugs Fund – a war chest launched in 2010 to pay for medicines that are not routinely available on the health service.
But demand has increased every year and officials say there just isn’t enough money to pay for all the drugs patients need. NHS England – which controls the fund – announced that treatments for breast, bowel, cervical and bone marrow cancers would no longer be available. Charities described the move as a backwards step and warned that many more patients would die sooner.