New cancer drugs threaten to stretch PBS thin

Rising R&D costs and the emerging trend of personalised medicine are heaping pressure on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme to subsidise more expensive cancer drugs, presenting major challenges to the scheme.

Flinders University Associate Professor Michael Sorich said pressure is mounting on the government to subsidise a growing number of high-cost cancer medications.

“The PBS is being asked to subsidise more drugs costing in the order of tens of thousands of dollars per patient,” Sorich said. “Those requests were quite rare in the past but they’re becoming more common, partly because of a change in the way cancer drugs are delivered.”

The medical community has discovered that cancers have subtypes, Sorich said. “For example we don’t just treat breast cancer anymore - there are many types of breast cancers and some respond better to different drugs. So we treat the patient with the drug that’s best for them.”

That said, Sorich believes that the price pharmaceutical companies set for cancer drugs is more likely to be dependent on the price individuals and healthcare systems are willing to pay than on production and R&D costs.

Sorich is delivering a presentation into the challenges rising treatment costs pose to the PBS system today at the Flinders Centre for Innovation in Cancer’s Cancer Insights Lecture Series. UniSA Emeritus Professor Lloyd Sansom is the keynote speaker.

The challenge of delivering affordable patient access to high-cost medications in a sustainable way is being faced by all countries, Sorich said. There is no one way forward.

He added that the aim of the seminar is to increase public awareness of the future challenge facing the PBS.

“We don’t want to scare people into thinking their medications won’t be subsidised anymore because once they’re on the PBS they’re rarely taken off. It’s more a question of whether new high-cost cancer drugs will be put on the PBS so individual patients can access them, and how we, as a society, will be able to afford them.”