How Much Do Cancer Drugs Cost?

The line from the pharmaceutical manufacturers have always been that it costs billions to develop new drugs. And they have to recoup their costs for the drugs that don ' t make it. This is why we have cancer treatments that cost well over $100,000 each year.But now the truth is out.Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development conducted a study ondevelopment costs of cancer drugs.What they found is a much lower total for development of a cancer drug." A new analysis finds the magic number is $648 million, which is substantially less than an earlier albeit controversial estimate of $2.6 billion for the cost to develop any and all new medicines, in general. As with that earlier estimate by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, though, this latest analysis is already engendering criticism, a reflection of an ongoing debate over true development costs and how these should be calculated. This is important because the pharmaceutical industry has often used R&D costs to justify its pricing. "“These results suggest that pharmaceutical drug development is extremely lucrative and the current drug prices are not necessarily justified by the R&D spending on these drugs, ’’ the researchers who conducted the new analysis — Dr. Vinay Prasad of Oregon Health and Science University and Dr. Sham Mailankody of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center — wrote in JAMA Internal Medicine. To arrive at their $648 million estimate, the researchers chose 10 pub...
Source: Caroline's Breast Cancer Blog - Category: Cancer & Oncology Tags: cancer costs medical research medication costs Source Type: blogs