Worldwide cancer spending tops $100 billion
pharmafile | May 5, 2015 | News story | Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | Cancer, IMS Health, keytruda, oncology
Over $100 billion was spent on cancer medicines across the world last year as a new generation of drugs begins to boost the market even further, a new report has revealed.
The IMS Health Global Oncology Trend report found that spending jumped 10% from 2013 and was up from $75 billion five years earlier, and cancer treatments now account for 10% of all global medicine expenditure.
“Earlier diagnosis, longer treatment duration and increased effectiveness of drug therapies are contributing to rising levels of expenditure on medicines for cancer,” the report explains, adding that the rising costs of new therapies in developed markets is also a major factor.
It says that spending is only set to increase, reaching up to $147 billion by 2018, as “new therapeutic classes and combination treatments change the cancer landscape”.
This includes immunotherapies – which help the body’s own immune system fight off cancer – and drugs that target specific genes or proteins, both of which have the potential for greater survival rates and fewer side effects than traditional medicines.
Immuno-oncology treatments such as Merck’s Keytruda (pembrolizumab) and Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Opdivo (nivolumab) have already been making waves in the market and boosting sales for these firms, while almost half of cancer spending in the US is now on targeted medicines such as Roche’s MabThera (rituximab) and Avastin (bevacizumab), as opposed to chemotherapies.
The large number of firms developing drugs in these classes will likely result in intense competition that could help keep prices from rising too high, the report says.
“Certain tumours, such as non-small cell lung cancer, will become battlegrounds, with multiple classes and multiple products within classes competing.”
The US was the biggest single spender on cancer medicines in 2014, accounting for 42% of the total market, followed by the top-five EU markets of Germany, France, the UK, Spain and Italy.
However there were no countries where patients could access all 37 of the cancer drugs launched between 2009 and 2013, and in South Korea, Spain and Japan fewer than half the new treatments were available.
The UK was ones of the countries that had the broadest access to therapies, alongside the US and Germany, although a report released last month noted that the NHS in the UK is still struggling with the demand required to improve its cancer services.
George Underwood
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