is trastuzumab still so expensive?

[GingerSue]

i

i was just reading about trastuzumab and came across this in wikipedia.

is trastuzumab still $70,000 for treatment?

why is it so expensive?

costs

trastuzumab costs about seventy thousand us dollars for a full course of treatment.`recently there has been controversy in new zealand and the uk about public health funding of this drug in the adjuvant setting due to its high cost and perceived limited overall survival (though not breast cancer-free survival). the campaign waged by cancer victims to get the governments to pay for their treatment has gone to the highest levels in the courts and the cabinet to get it licensed against the judgement of the regulator.after a sustained campaign from cancer sufferers, the ontario ministry of health in july 2005 that it would pay for treatments with trastuzumab and two other new and controversial anti-cancer drugs.

few reporters have questioned the pricing of this drug but when asked, genentech refuses to give details to explain the high costs.

since october 2006 trastuzumab has been made available for australian women with early stage breast cancer via the public benefits scheme. this is estimated to cost the country over $1 million australian. however, the women concerned are ecstatic and many more can now take the benefit of this drug who could not afford to before (some were selling everything in order to pay around $70 000 australian on average for the year). when herceptin was introduced in the uk there was considerable variation in availabity between different geographical regions. scotland was first to make the drug widely available - other areas eventually followed suit - but many women were prompted to launch legal actions against their local health authority in an effort to be treated with the drug.

[EricJRN, MSN, RN]

No experience with the cost of that particular drug, but monoclonal antibodies (drugs ending in -mab) can be very, very expensive due to the huge cost of production.

In order to produce monoclonal antibodies, companies generally have to go through this process where they inject mice with hybridomas (cancer cells that are expensive themselves) and collect the mAb-containing ascites that results (assuming that the hybridoma "takes" and the mouse doesn't die before developing ascites).

There are some techniques in the works related to culturing monoclonal antibodies, so it will be interesting to see if these are able to better control the costs of these drugs.

[adria37]

It is roughly about 50k for a years worth of drug. Tykerb the new oral biological is roughly 29k per year :thumbsup:

[DjMiG, BSN, RN]

Hey all,

I have been working in the Oncology field for the past 10+ years and trust me when i say that alot of these new targeted therapy type of drugs are expensive. I can say truthfully that when I order Herceptin (also known as Trastuzumab), each 440mg vial is $2,486.53 at MY COST. I'm not going to say who I work for, but we'll just say that this is the most competative cost for this medication. Tykerb hovers just around that cost as well.

I'll let you guys do the dosing and figure out what the cost is per cycle for the patient.

Feel free to msg me if you have any questions!

M