Posted by Michael Wonder on 21 May 2019
Extremely high drug prices should be reviewed for appropriateness
21 May 2019 - As medicine advances, a succession of highly efficacious but extremely costly therapeutic drugs have arrived on the market.
The issue of how to keep medical costs from swelling, while benefiting patients in need of such effective medicines, is an important challenge.
It has been decided that Kymriah, a new biological drug for the treatment of certain types of leukaemia and other blood cancers, is to be covered by public health insurance. The officially set price for a course of it is ¥33.49 million, a record high for a medication subject to public health insurance.
In Kymriah therapy, immune cells are harvested from patients’ blood, genetically engineered to enhance their ability to attack cancerous cells, and then injected back into patients. It is said to be effective for patients for whom conventional therapies have proved ineffective. The development of such new drugs should be welcomed.
