Anti-cancer drugs: WHO finds flaws in price rule

Less than a month after the Pharmaceutical Department made the controversial decision to keep patented medicines out of price control for five years, a new report by the World Health Organization revealed flaws in the decision.

The technical report on pricing of cancer drugs and its impact clearly shows that price regulation is essential for medicines to remain affordable, as drug prices set by pharmaceutical companies are "excessive, unjustified and constantly increasing, without any correlation. with investments in R & D ".

Discussed at the January 26th executive board meeting of the WHO, the report presents a comprehensive badysis of the revenues generated from the sale of 99 cancer drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration between 1989 and 2017.

"The badysis suggests that R & D and production costs may have little or no relation to the way pharmaceutical companies set prices for cancer drugs. Pharmaceutical companies set prices based on their business goals, with the focus on extracting the maximum amount that a buyer is willing to pay for his or her medications. This price approach often makes anti-cancer drugs unaffordable, thus preventing the full benefit of drugs, "the report says.

The badysis comes within three weeks of a disputed decision by the Department of Pharmaceutical Products of the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers, that a large number of patented drugs and rare disease drugs would remain outside of price control.

"The Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers' Drug Control (Price Control) Order 2019 exempts a manufacturer producing a new patented medicine under the Indian Patent Act of 1970 from five years from the beginning of its marketing manufacturer in the country, "says the notification of 3 January.

The provisions of the DPCO will not apply either to "drugs for the treatment of orphan diseases (rare)," he says. DPCO sets prices for scheduled preparations and monitors the maximum retail prices of all drugs, including unscheduled preparations.

"The exclusion of patented medicines is an unconstitutional and arbitrary decision that was taken without any normally organized public consultation within the government," DH Leena Menghaney, MSF Access Campaign Officer, told DH ( Doctors Without Borders).

An example of high treatment cost in India has been reported in the WHO report, which shows that standard bad cancer treatment costs 10 years of average annual salary in India, the cost of treatment being $ 18,500 or plus 1,300,000 rupees.

The DPCO amendment could lead some of the new anti-cancer drugs to become unaffordable for most Indian patients, sources said.