Three billion dollars: It’s enough to finance the annual out-of-pocket costs for 1 in 7 patients with cancer. It would cover almost half of the National Cancer Institute’s annual budget. And it could fund President Biden’s entire Cancer Moonshot program, with more than a billion to spare.
It’s also how much the United States spends on unused cancer drugs each year, some experts estimate.
The reason boils down to inefficient drug packaging. Drug companies typically sell infused drugs in one or two single-dose vial sizes, but patients don’t come in such neat packages. A patient may need 300 mg of a drug that is only sold as 200 mg vials, which means half of a vial will go to waste.
Although most oncology drugs don’t incur substantial waste, even small volumes can translate to millions of dollars a year.
But can this money be saved or reallocated, if only we delivered drugs more efficiently?
Some experts don’t believe that’s possible.
“Attempts to recoup money for discarded drugs wouldn’t happen in a vacuum,” said Robin Yabroff, PhD, MBA, an epidemiologist and scientific vice president of Health Services Research at the American Cancer Society, who was part of a committee commissioned to evaluate the costs associated with discarded drugs.
The potential catch of any widespread effort to seek repayment or reduce the amount of discarded drugs, Dr. Yabroff and colleagues note, is that manufacturers would “simply increase the price of the vial.”
In other words, attempting to fix one problem may lead to another — essentially a whack-a-mole of cancer costs, which are projected to balloon to $246 billion by 2030.
What this means is without sweeping policies to rein in cancer care costs, oncologists can only do so much. And every little bit counts.
“We are left chipping away at this monster of cancer care costs,” said Adam Binder, MD, a medical oncologist at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson Health in Philadelphia.
Millions spent on “reasonable amount” of waste
Michal Sarfaty, MD, was excited when enfortumab vedotin came on the market to treat advanced urothelial cancer in late 2019.
The cost of the drug, however, tempered her enthusiasm.
Enfortumab vedotin is a “great drug,” said Dr. Sarfaty, an oncologist at the Sheba Medical Center, Ramat Gan, Israel. But it can cost upwards of $500,000 a year for an average-weight man.
Given the expense, Dr. Sarfaty wanted to understand how much of the drug gets thrown away. During a fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center in New York, Dr. Sarfaty explored the amount of unused enfortumab vedotin among the 64 patients who received the drug in 2020. She, along with a team at MSK, calculated the price tag of that waste and extrapolated those estimates for patients across the country.
Although waste occurred in almost half of administered doses (367 of 793), only a small volume got discarded — 2.9% per dose, on average.
Multiplying unused milligrams by the cost per milligram, Dr. Sarfaty and colleagues estimated that, for each patient, $3,127 of the drug got discarded. When calculated over the year, the cost came to just over $200,000 at MSK, and nearly $15 million when projected across the approved patient population in the United States.
“Ultimately, we did not see a lot of waste with this specific drug,” Dr. Sarfaty said. “Under 2.9% is considered a reasonable amount, below the 3% threshold Peter Bach, MD, and colleagues recommend. But even with this small amount of waste, the cost per patient and to the system remains notable.”