The Cost of Cancer Drugs

Source: www.cbsnew.comAuthor: Lesley Stahl The following is a script of "The Cost of Cancer Drugs" which aired on October 5, 2014, and was rebroadcast on June 21, 2015. Lesley Stahl is the correspondent. Richard Bonin, producer. Cancer is so pervasive that it touches virtually every family in this country. More than one out of three Americans will be diagnosed with some form of it in their lifetime. And as anyone who's been through it knows, the shock and anxiety of the diagnosis is followed by a second jolt: the high price of cancer drugs. They are so astronomical that a growing number of patients can't afford their co-pay, the percentage of their drug bill they have to pay out-of-pocket. As we first reported in October, this has led to a revolt against the drug companies led by some of the most prominent cancer doctors in the country. Dr. Leonard Saltz: We're in a situation where a cancer diagnosis is one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcy. Dr. Leonard Saltz is chief of gastrointestinal oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering, one of the nation's premier cancer centers, and he's a leading expert on colon cancer. Lesley Stahl: So, are you saying in effect, that we have to start treating the cost of these drugs almost like a side effect from cancer? Dr. Leonard Saltz: I think that's a fair way of looking at it. We're starting to see the term "financial toxicity" being used in the literature. Individual patients are going into [...]

Real Cancer Drug Breakthrough Is Astronomical Prices

Source: Robert Langreth Blog In the wake of the FDA’s decision start the process to revoke Avastin’s approval in breast cancer last week, patients are puzzled and angry over how a drug once touted as a breakthrough  now can be branded as ineffective.  The controversy illustrates just how much the much-vaunted revolution in cancer therapy is driven by hype and high prices. Selling cancer drugs has become big business, with $52 billion in sales last year, according to IMS.  Some $6 billion of it goes right to Roche’s Avastin, the biggest selling of the new drugs. No wonder companies like Merck and Pfizer are  racing to develop new cancer drugs. But even as sales reach new heights, and prices keep going up–pretty much any cancer drug now costs $50,000 a year–the results from many trials are getting less and less impressive. Tarceva from Roche extends the life of pancreatic cancer patients by two weeks. Avastin has now failed to extend the lives of breast cancer patients in three giant trials. The hype about targeted cancer drugs has reached fever pitch thanks in part to baby boomers who don’t want to acknowledge their mortality; companies who need to sell hugely expensive drugs that can cost up to $100,000 a year; and science journalists eager for a positive story about a dread disease. The truth is that nobody wants to acknowledge the unpleasant fact that progress against most cancers has been grudgingly slow. Oncologists are in the business of providing hope to [...]

2010-12-21T13:56:53-07:00December, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

ASCO: Non-platinum regimen works in head, neck cancer

Source: www.medpagetoday.com Author: Michael Smith, North American Correspondent, MedPage Today A novel non-platinum-based regimen was efficacious in recurrent or metastatic squamous cell head and neck cancer, researchers said. The combination of pemetrexed (Alimta) and bevacizumab (Avastin) yielded a response rate of 30% in a small single-arm trial, according to Athanassios Argiris, MD, of the University of Pittsburgh, and colleagues. The combination also increased the length of time before patients progressed, and increased median overall survival, Argiris and colleagues reported in a poster discussion session at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology here. Patients with recurrent or metastatic disease typically have a poor prognosis, the researchers said, with median survival between six and nine months with standard chemotherapy. But, in other research, adding the monoclonal antibody cetuximab (Erbitux) to platinum-based chemotherapy increased survival, they said. Bevacizumab is a monoclonal antibody that targets the vascular epithelial growth factor (VEGF), which is expressed in squamous cell head and neck cancer; high levels of VEGF correlate with poor outcome, they noted. The researchers hypothesized that the antibody might enhance the activity of pemetrexed, which is a multi-targeted antifolate indicated for malignant pleural mesothelioma and non-small cell lung cancer. To test the idea, they analyzed results of treating 37 patients given 500 mg/m2 of pemetrexed and 15 mg/kg of bevacizumab intravenously every 21 days until disease progression. Patients were also given folic acid and vitamin B12. The primary endpoint of the study was time to progression, they said, but the researchers [...]

Monoclonal Antibody Drugs for Cancer Treatment

Source: www.newswise.com Author: staff The strategy of using monoclonal antibodies for cancer treatment was first described in the late 1970s with the promise that they could be developed into therapies that were highly specific to cancer cells, killing them with few or no side effects. For several types of cancer, monoclonal antibodies have already offered this advantage to patients. For other cancer types, they have provided an additional therapeutic weapon, but with smaller benefits and sometimes new side effects. "The first efforts for monoclonal antibody cancer therapy were to find antibodies that would home in on tumors and bind to proteins on the surface of cancer cells," explained physician-scientist David A. Scheinberg. "We looked for unique proteins that were specific only to cancer cells. The idea was that the antibody would be used to stimulate an immune response in the body, which would kill the cancer cell." Dr. Scheinberg, who is Chair of Memorial Sloan-Kettering's Experimental Therapeutics Center and the Molecular Pharmacology and Chemistry Program within the Sloan-Kettering Institute, developed an antibody called M195, which targets a protein on leukemia cells, when working as a research fellow in collaboration with Memorial Sloan-Kettering immunologist Lloyd Old in the 1980s. This approach further evolved when researchers realized they could use the antibody as a carrier to deliver a radioactive isotope or a toxic drug directly to the cancer cell, where it would kill the cell while sparing nearby healthy tissue. Antibodies are proteins that help the immune system to identify foreign substances [...]

Tarceva® and Avastin® safe and effective for patients with squamous-cell head and neck carcinoma

Source: professional.cancerconsultants.com Author: staff Researchers from the National Cancer Institute and the University of Chicago have reported that the combination of Tarceva® (erlotinib) and Avastin® (bevacizumab) is well tolerated and produces sustained responses in some patients with recurrent or metastatic squamous-cell head and neck carcinoma. The details of this study appeared in the March 2009 issue of Lancet Oncology.[1] Tarceva is an epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) tyrosine kinase inhibitor. EGFRs are small proteins that are found on the surface of all cells. EGFR binds exclusively to small growth factor proteins circulating in the blood. The binding action between EGFR and growth factors stimulates biological processes within the cell to promote growth of a cell in a strictly controlled manner. However, in many cancer cells, EGFR is either abundantly over-expressed or the EGFR biological processes that normally stimulate cell growth are constantly active, leading to the uncontrolled and excessive growth of the cancer cell. Tarceva is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of non–small cell lung cancer and has significant activity in a variety of tumors, including hepatocellular carcinoma, pancreatic cancer, colorectal cancer, and renal cell cancer. Avastin is a humanized monoclonal antibody that is targeted against the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). Avastin is approved by the FDA for the initial treatment of advanced colorectal cancer in combination with 5-fluorouracil-based therapy and has demonstrated an improvement in survival when combined with Camptosar® (irinotecan)-based chemotherapy in the treatment of this disease. Avastin was also [...]

Avastin, Erbitux combo proves dangerous

Source: www.newsinferno.com Author: staff Combining Avastin and Erbitux with chemotherapy to treat colon cancer may actually make patients sicker, and cause their tumors to grow faster. According to a new Dutch study, using Avastin and Erbitux to increase the effectiveness of chemotherapy is a complete failure, and could actually cut the survival time of patients by as much as a month. Avastin was approved by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) in 2004 to treat colon cancer, and in 2006, the agency approved it as a treatment for non-small cell lung cancer. Last year, the FDA also approved Avastin as a breast cancer treatment. Avastin was the first approved therapy designed to inhibit angiogenesis, the process by which new blood vessels develop and carry vital nutrients to a tumor. Erbitux is indicated for the treatment of patients who have colorectal cancer that has spread to other parts of the body and whose tumor expresses a protein called an Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor. Erbitux was approved by the FDA to treat advanced colon cancer in 2004, and again in 2006 for treating squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck It was theorized that adding Erbitux and Avastin to chemotherapy could boost benefits, but unfortunately, the Dutch study has proven the opposite to be true. The study looked at 732 patients; 378 patients where treated with chemo plus Avastin. The remaining patients received chemo along with Avastin and Erbitux. Median progression-free survival was 10.7 months among those receiving only Avastin with [...]

2009-02-07T13:44:11-07:00February, 2009|Oral Cancer News|

Bevacizumab better than gold standard imaging at detecting tumors

Source: www.biocompare.com Author: staff Scientists have developed a new imaging agent that can be used in scanning for tumours, and which gives a much clearer and more precise image than existing methods. The discovery has the potential to revolutionise pre-clinical cancer research and clinical diagnostic practice, and it makes use of compounds that have already been approved for treating patients: the anti-cancer drug bevacizumab (Avastin) and Copper-64, a radioactive copper nuclide, which is approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for some clinical trials. Dr Zheng Jim Wang told the 20th EORTC-NCI-AACR [1] Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics in Geneva today (Wednesday 22 October) that he and his colleagues had attached bevacizumab to a molecule called DOTA (a cyclic compound) and tagged it with a radioactive tracer, Copper-64 (64Cu). Bevacizumab is an antibody that targets vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), a signalling protein released by tumour cells and which plays an important role in angiogenesis (the process by which a growing tumour creates its own blood supply). Currently, bevacizumab is being used to treat patients with advanced colorectal cancer and is being tested in several other metastatic cancers. When the researchers injected the compound (64Cu-bevacizumab) into mice with breast, lung and pancreatic cancers and then used PET/CT imaging to scan the animals, they found that it successfully targeted the cancer cells, accumulating in high concentrations in the tumours, and that it enabled clear and well-defined images of the tumours to be detected during scanning. When compared [...]

Go to Top