As the one-year cost of cancer drugs edges up to $200,000 per patient, a top doctor from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center used his speech before a massive gathering of colleagues to call for limits on the cost of cancer therapies. “These drugs cost too much,” Dr. Leonard Saltz, a gastrointestinal oncologist, said in an unusual speech at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting on Sunday.

“We need to first accept that there has to be some upper limit as to what we as a society are going to be willing to spend on a patient, and we have to be willing to engage in that discussion,” Saltz told Bloomberg in an interview from the meeting in Chicago. “It’s a very uncomfortable discussion. We should be willing to have it. Because we’re not having the conversation, only the people selling the drugs are weighing in on what they should cost.”

Saltz has been among an outspoken group of physicians at Memorial Sloan Kettering that has railed against high-priced cancer drugs. He co-wrote a 2012 op-ed in the New York Timesdefending the decision to stop prescribing a “phenomenally expensive” new drug. In his latest broadside he lit into the cost of a melanoma drug combination from Bristol-Myers Squibb, just hours after another physician from his hospital presented data showing the combination could delay the progression of advanced melanoma by months.

For more details, go to: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-01/this-cancer-doctor-is-leading-the-attack-on-astronomical-drug-prices