Ibrutinib, idelalisib, GA-101 (aka obinatuzumab - if I got that right), ABT-199, etc. The tidal wave of new drugs is exciting because we will soon be treating the disease with therapies that are very effective and lack many of the side effects of chemotherapy. These are some of the exciting new drugs coming soon for patients with CLL and NHL. Unfortunately they will probably also break the bank. I bet that ibrutinib costs about $150k per year... that is my prediction.
CML is a leukemia that has a lot in common with CLL. It is a slow cancer that affects about 10k new patients per year. Historically (before the year 2000) patients lived a number of years (3-5) with the disease and put up with a bunch of lousy chemotherapy drugs that didn't do much. Eventually the disease took on a nasty personality (like richter's transformation) and the patient died of "blast crisis."
That all changed in 2000 when a new "wonder pill" called Gleevec made the disease vanish from patients blood. A single, once a day medication literally changed overnight what it meant to hvae the diagnosis of CML. Newer, more sensitive molecular tests were required to even detect the disease that could no longer be seen by standard tests like, "cytogenetics." Sounds familiar right?
Gleevec cost about $40k/year when it first came out (we can talk about how much that price has risen later). While that number seems extremely high - it is inexpensive compared to many of the new drugs for cancer.
Why so high?
Read entire article here:
http://www.cll-nhl.com/2013/05/how-expensive-are-new-drugs.html
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