Lung cancer patients denied access to treatment during awareness month 1

Desperately sick lung cancer patients who have failed treatment with chemotherapy have been denied subsidised access to a new medicine that could potentially shrink their tumours, stabilise their disease and improve their quality of life.

Iressa is the first of a new class of targeted drugs that has been shown to effectively “switch off” one of the important signals in cancer cell growth.The Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC) is requiring lung cancer patients to undergo genetic tests to identify gene mutations in their tumour tissue. This is despite new research that supports a Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) listing for Iressa (gefitinib), which would provide a broader group of lung cancer patients with subsidised access to the treatment.Associate Professor Matthew Peters, respiratory physician at Concord Hospital, Sydney, said today that the decision effectively denied some lung cancer patients a treatment option. He said it was clear that not all patients responded to treatment with Iressa but it eliminated all identifiable tumour in some patients and in many others there was stabilisation of tumour growth with symptom improvement. Common side effects are relatively minor.”For most patients, it will not even be possible to do this test- let alone get a valid result,” Professor Peters said.”The PBAC is right to be concerned about containing costs, however the way it proposes to limit use of Iressa is impractical and unproven. In the future it may be possible to look at a patient’s genes or the genetic makeup of a tumour and decide whether a drug will work or not. The decision of the PBAC to do that now based on the results of only 25 patients is surprising. Normally, results from hundreds or thousands of cases are needed to guide decision making.”If patients who would have been prescribed Iressa, receive the alternative chemotherapy, the costs to the PBS will actually increase. Therefore, the PBAC decision only saves money if patients with lung cancer in this situation go untreated. Lung cancer patients, therefore, have a right to feel hard done by.”(Please see Lung cancer patients denied access to treatment during awareness month 2 for the complete article).