#LCSM Chat Topic 4/24: Cost vs. Value with Expensive Cancer Treatments

Our topic for the upcoming #LCSM tweet chat on Thursday, April 24 at 8 PM Eastern, 5 PM Pacific is the question of “cost vs value” in cancer treatments. The moderator for this chat will be Dr. Jack West. ASCO (American Society of Clinical Oncology) has recently announced an initiative to define value in cancer treatments and apply some expectations of which drugs should be used, given their remarkable cost. Newer medications are typically costing about $10,000 per month, and the price is rising rapidly. Newer drugs have varying amounts of evidence… Read More

Upcoming #LCSM Chat, Thursday, March 27 at 5 pm PT, 8 pm ET: Should All Targeted Rx Lung Cancer Trials be Biomarker-Selective?

ASCO, the American Society for Clinical Oncology, is promoting a new principle that targeted therapies should be used only in targeted patients, as part of a general trend that we need to move away from trials that test new non-chemotherapy agents in a broad population. Meanwhile, we’ve just recently seen a few high profile negative trials in the last few weeks, such as the large phase III METLung trial of “METMAb” or onartuzumab, the monoclonal antibody against the target MET (mesenchymal epithelial transition), combined with Tarceva (erlotinib), and also the MAGE-A3 vaccine… Read More

How Much Evidence Do We Really Need to Change Treatment Recommendations? – October 10

By Dr. H. Jack West One ongoing controversy in the world of managing cancer, especially one in which cures are elusive, is how high the bar should be to guide treatment recommendations. The “gold standard” to change treatment is a significant improvement in the primary endpoint, ideally overall survival, in a prospective, randomized phase III trial with several hundred or even several thousand people. In some settings, treatment recommendations may not even change until a few randomized phase III trials show the same significant improvement with a new treatment approach. But the reality is that sometimes we want… Read More