Rising drug prices is an issue that everyone from the President to both Houses of Congress (Democrats and Republicans), Wall Street, and Main Street can agree must be alleviated, and perhaps the most expensive drugs are those that treat cancer.  This reality is a combination of the severity of the disease and the nature of the drugs, which are generally biologic drugs characterized by structural complexity, production difficulties, and high cost of regulatory approval.  As reported in Genetic Engineering News, the trend of increasing drug prices continued among most of the top ten highest selling cancer drugs currently on the market.

The basis for the information disclosed in GEN is a report from IQVIA™ Institute for Human Data Science entitled Global Oncology Drug Trends 2018, which showed that cancer treatment costs average over $150,000 on 2017 with total spend in the U.S. on these drugs of almost $50 billion (compared with a total of $60 billion for the rest of the world).  The situation may get even worse, with cancer drug prices expected to double again by 2022 in the U.S. and there being an equivalent percentage rise (10-13% annually) in the rest of the world.

Details of these drugs are provided in the table below.