2 October 2015 - Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. said its combination of two key cancer drugs, approved Thursday by U.S. regulators for a form of melanoma, will carry a list price of $256,000 a year on average.

The price is for a patient that takes four doses of the combination -- which includes a standard dose of the drug Yervoy and a lower dose of Opdivo -- every three weeks, followed by a higher dose of Opdivo alone every two weeks.

The cost of cancer treatments has drawn scrutiny from doctors such as Leonard Saltz of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, who estimated earlier this year that the Opdivo-Yervoy combination would cost the average patient $295,000 for a little less than a year of treatment. If all advanced cancer patients in the U.S. received drugs at that estimated price, he projected, the total cost would reach $174 billion per year.

In May, Bristol-Myers reported data on the Yervoy-Opdivo combination based on a study of 945 patients with advanced melanoma who hadn’t previously been treated. The trial found that 58 percent of those who received both drugs had significant tumor shrinkage, compared with 44 percent in the group that took Opdivo alone and 19 percent for just Yervoy. Combination patients also went months longer without their cancer progressing.

For more details, go to: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-01/bristol-myers-cancer-drug-combination-to-cost-256-000-a-year