7 May 2019 - Immunotherapies have become so effective and popular that some cancer patients were cured. However, they are still a hot potato for the Korean authorities to decide whether to give them insurance benefits because of their low response rates and high prices.

Recently, the government suggested “performance-based reimbursement criteria” to pharmaceuticals, allowing reimbursements only to immunotherapies with meaningful drug response to give cancer patients easier access to immunotherapies and minimise the government’s spending.

“Immunotherapies show good therapeutic effects in patients with a response. However, their efficacy remains for a very short time, or they don’t work at all in patients without any response,” the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service (HIRA) said. “We could not give insurance coverage to all of the patients who meet the current standard of PD-L1 (programmed death-ligand 1) response rate. That is why we came up with this measure.”

Read Korea Biomedical Review article