Prostate cancer new drug make up for treatment gap is fiercely competitive and expensive

Business News Agency August 10 News In the past 15 months, three drugs that can prolong the life of prostate cancer patients have received FDA approval. Other promising drugs are also in clinical trials. Before last year, only one drug, Docetaxel, was shown to improve the survival of patients. The drug was approved in 2004.

New medicines make up for the blank

As several new drugs compete to fill the therapeutic gap to improve long-term survival, a new round of competition for pharmaceutical companies will begin. Analysts estimate that some new drugs, such as Dendreon’s Provenge and Johnson’s Zytiga, are expected to reach US$1 billion in annual sales, or even more.

Recently approved drugs and most of the drugs in development have spread to human body parts other than the prostate gland for the treatment of prostate cancer. The use of hormone therapy has been unable to control the disease.

Patients with advanced prostate cancer treated with docetaxel have a median survival of approximately one and a half years. In clinical trials, each new drug makes this median survival increase by 2 to 5 months. The doctor said that patients taking more than one drug in a row are expected to survive for more than two years.

However, the high pricing of these drugs has created worries for patients, medical institutions and insurance companies. For example, one course of Provenge costs up to 93,000 U.S. dollars, while Zytiga's monthly treatment costs about 5,000 U.S. dollars. The three-week treatment cost of Jevtana produced by Sanofi is approximately US$8,000.

With the successive listing of expensive drugs, the average cost per patient will reach 500,000 U.S. dollars or more. Analysts believe that this is far from being affordable in the U.S. healthcare system, especially when 80% of patients participate in the Medicare program.

Medicare paid full attention to the high drug price warning issued by analysts. It launched a one-year investigation of Provenge's reimbursement process. Medicare will pay for patients using Provenge according to the drug label.

Medicare officials denied that the price was the reason for the review. Some patient representatives and politicians described this review as an important part of making medicines reasonably priced.

Future competition is fierce

For now, the drug prices set by a pharmaceutical company will encourage other companies to follow suit. For example, a regular course of Alpharadin requires approximately $25,000. With rivals producing drugs Jevtana costs up to about $50,000, Algeta and its partner Bayer are considering increasing the price of Alpharadin.

According to data provided by the American Cancer Society, approximately 218,000 men in the United States develop prostate cancer each year, and approximately 32,000 people die as a result.

In many cases, this cancer can be discovered before it spreads to parts of the body other than the prostate, and can be cured by surgery or radiation therapy. If the cancer spreads, the patient is usually treated and the Lupron produced by Abbott is generally used. These drugs inhibit the production of testosterone, which stimulates the growth of the tumor.

So far, when this hormone inhibitor ceases to exert therapeutic effects, newly developed drugs are available to patients. Provenge was approved for marketing in April 2010. The prostate cancer patients are at an advanced stage but have not yet caused many symptoms. It is expected that competition will become more intense in the future. Japan Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. and San Francisco Medivation Inc. independently developed other drugs to block testosterone production.

An experimental drug, Cabozantinib, developed by Exelixis, allows some patients to eliminate bone metastases. This condition can be measured by bone scans, but other drugs cannot achieve this effect.

In November last year, Xgeva, developed by Amgen, received FDA approval to reduce the risk of cancer causing bone fractures and other problems at the skeletal site. According to a recent trial, Xgeva can also delay the spread of cancer to bones.