Toward a new kind of lung cancer awareness: Addressing financial toxicity

November is Lung Cancer Awareness Month, a time to turn our attention to an issue that already warrants our focus year-round. 

Lung cancer is a leading cause of cancer death in nearly every country on earth. In the United States alone, someone is diagnosed every two minutes, and every four minutes someone dies from this disease. But too often these fatalities aren’t the product of terminal illness—they’re preventable deaths caused by financial strain.

Over the last two decades, we’ve witnessed a realization of the goal of precision medicine in oncology, and thoracic oncology has been a crucial proving ground for new technologies and powerful, targeted therapeutics. These new therapies often offer enormous promise for patients who can access them—but in too many cases, the price of specialty drugs undermines that promise. 

Basic market principles dictate that as we get better at producing something, prices should fall. That’s not happening here.

Unfortunately, the potential impact of these advances is limited by their cost and, ultimately, limits access to them. In 2000, a “standard” course of chemotherapy and some palliative radiation therapy for metastatic non-small lung cancer would cost approximately $56,000 over six months. Since then, we’ve been fortunate to see a decline in mortality and many with lung cancer …

By Vincent A. Miller, MDPhysician-in-chief, EQRx;Former chief medical officer, Foundation Medicine

Source: Cancer Letter

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