America is suffering through one of the most severe shortages of chemotherapy drugs it has seen for three decades, with as many as 100 000 patients having been affected over the past several months.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said more than 130 drugs were in short supply in the country, with 14 of them being cancer treatments, reports BBC News.
Various factors have contributed to the shortages, which have heavily affected two front-line therapies, carboplatin and cisplatin, used to treat a host of cancers, including head and neck, gynaecologic and gastrointestinal cancers.
The most recent shortage came after a plant in India that supplied cisplatin materials for all US manufacturers was shut down after quality concerns.
This drove up demand for the substitute drug carboplatin, said Dr Julie Gralow, chief medical officer at the American Society of Clinical Oncology, forcing some providers to extend the time period between patients’ chemotherapy sessions, while some patients have had to drive to various cancer centres to get treatment.
The low cost of generic front-line cancer drugs has actually played a role in recurrent chemotherapy drug shortages, experts say. While the medications are cheap to manufacture, pharmaceutical companies are not incentivised to do so because they don’t bring in large profits, said Dr Karen Knudsen, CEO of the American Cancer Society.
The drug shortage issue has also worsened as US life expectancy has increased, meaning more people are becoming ill with cancer.
To help ease the supply chain crunches, the FDA began working with a Chinese manufacturer this week to import one of the chemotherapy drugs, which might help solve some short-term supply constraints, but will do little to resolve a more cyclical problem of chemotherapy drug shortages, said Knudsen.
Gralow suggested the government work with the private sector to devise more long-term solutions, like using its drug purchasing dollars to create national strategic reserves of the critical medicines, and incentivising more higher-quality pharmaceutical companies to manufacture them.
BBC News article – US doctors forced to ration as cancer drug shortages hit nationwide (Open access)
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