1701P - Cancer premium: Explaining differences in prices for cancer vs non-cancer drugs with efficacy and epidemiological endpoints in the US, Germany, and Switzerland

Background

High treatment prices of new cancer drugs are a global public health challenge to patients and healthcare systems. Policymakers in the US and Europe are debating reforms to drug pricing. The objective was to assess whether drug efficacy or epidemiological characteristics (prevalence, incidence, mortality) explain the gap in treatment prices between cancer and non-cancer drugs in the US, Germany, and Switzerland.

Methods

This cross-sectional study identified all new drugs approved in the US, Germany, and Switzerland between 2011 and 2020. Drug efficacy was extracted from the pivotal trials, drug prices from public and commercial databases, and epidemiological characteristics from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2019 study. We used regression models to explain drug prices with drug efficacy and epidemiological characteristics (prevalence, incidence, mortality).

Results

The cohort included 181 drugs, including 68 (37.5%) drugs approved for treatment of cancer. A significant negative correlation was found between incidence/prevalence and treatment prices, and a significant positive correlation was observed between mortality and treatment prices for both, cancer and non-cancer drugs. A significant association between relative drug efficacy and treatment prices of drugs was observed, however, less pronounced for cancer drugs. Our regression estimates indicated that after adjusting for efficacy and epidemiological characteristics, cancer drugs were on average approximately three times more expensive compared to non-cancer drugs in all three countries, indicating a cancer premium. Our model explained 72% of the variance in observed prices (R2).

Conclusions

Drug pricing reforms should target the cancer premium to improve access of patients to cancer drugs as well as to achieve equity across the different therapeutic areas and sustainability in the health care systems.

Clinical trial identification

Editorial acknowledgement

Legal entity responsible for the study

K.N. Vokinger.

Funding

Swiss Cancer Research Foundation, Swiss National Science Foundation.

Disclosure

All authors have declared no conflicts of interest.