Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Pharma Facts

The journal Prescrire analysed the medicines that were introduced to the French market between 2006 and 2011, declared that only one medicine of significant therapeutic interest was brought to the market.

Oncologists from fifteen countries recently denounced the excessive prices of cancer treatments, which are necessary to save the lives of the patients, and urged that moral implications should prevail; according to them, of the 12 cancer treatments approved in 2012 by the United States Food and Drug Administration, 11 cost more than 100,000 dollars per patient per year.

In 2014, a number of European countries, including France and Spain, spent many months negotiating with the company Gilead on the price of a new medicine for hepatitis C known as Solvaldi. The price fixed by Gilead was 56,000 Euros per patient for a twelve-week treatment, or 666 Euros per tablet. According to Le Monde the price of each tablet was 280 times more than the production cost. In France, it is calculated that 250,000 patients should receive this medicine, the cost of which would represent 7 per cent of the annual state medicine budget.


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