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Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs Melody Petersen See book keywords and concepts

In 2006 a drug called avastin could cost cancer patients as much as $100,000 a year, depending on the dose and type of cancer. When doctors added a medicine called Erbitux to the standard chemotherapy regimen for patients with advanced colon cancer, the cost of treatment rose to as much as $250,000. For patients with a rare disorder called Gaucher's disease, the needed drug, Cerezyme, could cost more than $600,000 a year. The pharmaceutical industry had long argued that its high prices were needed to cover the cost of discovering new medicines.

You Don't Have to be Afraid of Cancer Anymore Bill Sardi See book keywords and concepts

I u on Regimen Universal dietary and supplement regimens to successfully fight cancer drugs like Herceptin, avastin, Erbitux that temporarily infuse targeted antibodies into a tumor. Anticancer mechanisms within your own body can be activated to put a stop to cancer in a continual manner that exceeds that of anti-cancer drugs. Cancer authorities now speak of universal mechanisms that can be manipulated to block the growth, spread and recurrence of cancer.

Most recently, with media reports celebrating such revolutionary cancer medicines as Gleevec, Herceptin, Iressa, Er-bitux, and the just-approved avastin, the cure has seemed closer than ever. But it's not. Hope and optimism, so essential to this fight, have masked some very real systemic problems that have made this complex, elusive, relentless foe even harder to defeat. The result is that while there have been substantial achievements since the crusade began with the National Cancer Act in 1971, we are far from winning the war. So far away, in fact, that it looks like losing. Living longer?

High hopes are pinned on targeted therapies, drugs that inhibit specific enzymes or pathways, such as avastin, Erbitux, Tarceva and Iressa, which all became available with "great fanfare." Then came the sticker shock. These drugs are priced at thousands of dollars per month of treatment and are only effective when added to other treatments. "Clinicians are wondering whether these new drugs are worth the cost," said the journal article. "America is starving for effective therapies,"says Bruce E. Hillner, MD, of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

In the pivotal Phase III study, the addition of avastin to chemotherapy (irinotecan/5-fluorouracil/leucovorin) significantly extended survival by, on average, 4.7 months (20.3 months versus 15.6 months) for people with previously untreated metastatic colorectal cancer. [New England Journal of Medicine 350: 2335-2342, 2004] But this was at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars. Shall we bankrupt government and private health insurance plans to provide colon cancer patients with a few more months of life?

He says there is a new drug, avastin (a drug that inhibits growth of new blood vessels that feeds tumors), and many patients on it are surviving much longer. The doctor orders the expensive drug after having gained approval from Manny's health plan. The reason why the approval is required is that the drug costs $10,000 per month. The health plan says they will pay for the drug, but Manny has to come up with $1,000 per month as a co-payment. To come up with the money, the family sells Manny's car since he is not using it any more to go to work.

J Clinical Oncology 9: 286-94, 1991 ] avastin, the newly introduced anti-angiogenesis drug, carries a serious risk of blood clots, its manufacturer has warned. [American Cancer Society News Center, August 17, 2004] The annual incidence of blood clots (venous thromboembolism) is not only directly life threatening if they enter the lungs or block circulation to the brain or heart, but they also portend a poor prognosis for cancer patients. Only 12% survive beyond a year if they develop clots. An estimated 11-20% of cancer patients on chemotherapy develop blood clots. [Thrombosis Research Dec.

Big Pharma: Exposing the Global Healthcare Agenda Jacky Law See book keywords and concepts

Napoleone Ferrara, Avastin's originating scientist, said he was only able to discover how new blood vessels grow to feed a turnout with nutrients because he had been given the time to do so,43 describing how it is company policy that a quarter of researchers' time should be spent on projects of their own choosing. Avastin's launch was the most successful in US oncology history, earning $545 million in its first ten months on the US market. 'This exceeded the first full-year revenues of any other product in this therapeutic category by approximately $175 million,' said Levinson.

Another kind of drug, avastin, again initially for colon cancer, blocks a protein that encourages blood vessels that grow specifically to feed a tumour, thus starving it of another source A bit of a lottery of growth. The genius of yet a third kind is represented by Glivec, which identifies, and then reverses, a genetic flaw which, in this case, turns on an enzyme that causes a rare form of blood cancer. These are real advances and doctors love them. They don't care what they cost because the results in some patients are fantastic and, on the whole, they are well tolerated.

For all the hype surrounding avastin, it only extended the life of patients for five months more than those taking standard chemotherapy,' said Dyer.11 As such, the drugs are proving to be as much a lifeline to the industry as to the people they treat. The health gains may not be great, being measured in months rather than years, but the drugs do extend life and that's what matters most in medicine. Besides, costs naturally come down once the patent term has expired, and for now they are delivering results, the importance of which cannot be overstated.

He went on to present positive findings in kidney cancer, a traditionally hard tumour to treat, using avastin and Tarceva. 'The rationale was to try to build on the biology by blocking more than one signalling molecule within these cells,' he said.25 That same combination of drugs has also been shown to be effective in non-small cell lung cancer. So far the improvements are modest but it is early days. If they are shown to stop progression of the tumour for 18-24 months rather than 12-14 months, says Hainsworth, they will be hard to resist.

Genentech, for example, has developed a number of new cancer drugs, including avastin. In a letter to stockholders in its 2004 annual report, CEO Arthur D. Levinson boasted how total operating revenues had increased to $4-6 billion, more than doubling since 2001. 'Out financial position also remains strong, with approximately $2.8 billion in unrestricted cash and investments,' he added.42 One of the reasons Genentech, which is now 60% owned by Roche of Switzerland, has done well is that it takes risks to nurture cteativity.

Best Choices From the People's Pharmacy Joe Graedon, M.S. and Teresa Graedon, Ph.D. See book keywords and concepts

Avastin (bevacizumab) for colorectal cancer can cost $4,400 per month. Revlimid (lenalidomide), a treatment for multiple myeloma, could cost more than $70,000 per year. And Erbitux (cetuximab) for head and neck or colorectal cancer might exceed $110,000 annually. Two decades ago we spoke with a drug company insider. This former executive related a top-level meeting in which this question was raised: "If you found a cure for cancer, what would you charge for it?" The executive who was being grilled admitted that they would almost have to give it away.

Natural Cures They Don't Want You to Know About Kevin Trudeau See book keywords and concepts

The Associated Press reports that the drug avastin increases the risk of heart ailments including chest pain, strokes, mini-strokes, and heart attacks. This means that this drug can kill the people who take it. It is interesting to note that every article that I am reporting on here that talks about drugs also has a heavy emphasis on the stock price and how this news is affecting shareholder value. I cannot emphasize enough that drug companies are publicly traded companies whose only objective is to make profit. They do not want to cure or prevent disease.

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