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Global health
Research
Estimated generic prices of cancer medicines deemed cost-ineffective in England: a cost estimation analysis
  1. Andrew Hill1,
  2. Christopher Redd2,
  3. Dzintars Gotham3,
  4. Isabelle Erbacher3,
  5. Jonathan Meldrum4,
  6. Ryo Harada5
  1. 1Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
  2. 2Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry, Peninsula Medical School, Universities of Exeter and Plymouth, Plymouth, UK
  3. 3Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, London, UK
  4. 4Faculty of Medical Sciences, University College London, London, UK
  5. 5Department of Economics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dzintars Gotham; dg1911{at}ic.ac.uk

Abstract

Objectives The aim of this study was to estimate lowest possible treatment costs for four novel cancer drugs, hypothesising that generic manufacturing could significantly reduce treatment costs.

Setting This research was carried out in a non-clinical research setting using secondary data.

Participants There were no human participants in the study. Four drugs were selected for the study: bortezomib, dasatinib, everolimus and gefitinib. These medications were selected according to their clinical importance, novel pharmaceutical actions and the availability of generic price data.

Primary and secondary outcome measures Target costs for treatment were to be generated for each indication for each treatment. The primary outcome measure was the target cost according to a production cost calculation algorithm. The secondary outcome measure was the target cost as the lowest available generic price; this was necessary where export data were not available to generate an estimate from our cost calculation algorithm. Other outcomes included patent expiry dates and total eligible treatment populations.

Results Target prices were £411 per cycle for bortezomib, £9 per month for dasatinib, £852 per month for everolimus and £10 per month for gefitinib. Compared with current list prices in England, these target prices would represent reductions of 74–99.6%. Patent expiry dates were bortezomib 2014–22, dasatinib 2020–26, everolimus 2019–25 and gefitinib 2017. The total global eligible treatment population in 1 year is 769 736.

Conclusions Our findings demonstrate that affordable drug treatment costs are possible for novel cancer drugs, suggesting that new therapeutic options can be made available to patients and doctors worldwide. Assessing treatment cost estimations alongside cost-effectiveness evaluations is an important area of future research.

  • CLINICAL PHARMACOLOGY
  • HEALTH ECONOMICS
  • ONCOLOGY
  • PUBLIC HEALTH
  • THERAPEUTICS

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2016-011965

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors AH designed the study question and methodology. CR drafted the manuscript. AH and DG provided critique. All authors reviewed and approved the final manuscript.

    • Funding This work was supported by an unrestricted research grant from MetaVirology.

    • Disclaimer MetaVirology had no editorial control over the final report.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Data sharing statement Unpublished export price data for each drug are available to interested researchers by emailing the corresponding author. The data include shipment size, export destination and cost.