Cancer Drugs Cost More Than Ever. They Often Don’t Extend Lives
The moment she heard that her mother, then 67, had advanced breast cancer, Stacie Dusetzina began hunting for potential treatments. A cancer policy researcher at Vanderbilt University, Dusetzina knew the go-to drug in many cases was Pfizer Inc.’s Ibrance. She learned it might cost her mother, who lived on a fixed income, around $10,000 out of pocket annually.
Medicare, required by law to cover cancer treatment, would have paid much of the rest of the cost. At the time, in 2020, the pill listed for a jaw-dropping $160,000 a year, rising more recently to $214,000.
Despite having a PhD in pharmaceutical science, Dusetzina couldn’t figure out whether swallowing those costs — potentially for years — would help her mom live any longer or any better. Her research showed that while the drug might shrink tumors, no clinical trials proved it would extend her mother’s life. At the time of her search, Ibrance had already been on the market for five years. “I could not find any satisfactory data where I could say this is worth the money,” said Dusetzina, whose mother ended up not using the drug because she had a less common type of cancer. “It was really frustrating.”
Cancer Capitalism
This is the first story in a series about how the hunt for profit can harm cancer patients.
Ibrance is one of the biggest-selling drugs in a revolution that has made new treatments available to American cancer patients faster than ever before. Prodded by legislation backed by drugmakers that allowed the Food and Drug Administration to speed approvals, the regulator greenlit more than 200 cancer drugs over the past three decades. Cancer treatments generated at least $200 billion in worldwide sales for the pharmaceutical industry last year, turning the once-sleepy oncology business into a gold mine more than 10 times bigger than obesity drugs.
The profusion of new treatments is a source of hope for many patients. Some drugs are game-changers, especially new immune therapies that teach the body itself how to destroy cancer cells. But the downside of approving so many drugs with so few hurdles is now clear: Many don’t prolong life at all, or do so only modestly, with problematic side effects. Indeed, fewer than half of the cancer drugs approved since 2000 that Bloomberg News reviewed based on their FDA labels have ever been shown to extend patient survival for any of their approved uses. Even fewer have been shown to improve cancer-related symptoms or quality of life.
In the past decade alone, drugmakers have made more than $50 billion on cancer drugs that so far have demonstrated no survival benefit, Bloomberg’s analysis shows.
