By Curt Pesman and Mary Miller

In an unusual move, sanofi pharmaceutical company has instituted a 50 percent discount, effective immediately, on its latest cancer drug Zaltrap.  The reason for the sharp price drop, company officials said, was “market resistance” to the initial price.

Zaltrap was approved in August by the FDA for second-line treatment for metastatic colorectal cancer.

One possible result of the price cut is that the new drug may become more widely available. However, due to complex pricing and regulation issues, it’s not yet known how the actual cost to patients will change over the next several months. Fight Colorectal Cancer is gathering more information today on this issue from oncologists and company officials. Read the rest of this entry »

The U.S. sticker price for cancer care by 2020 will likely increase at least 27% over the next decade, to a minimum $158 billion yearly by 2020, according to the National Cancer Institute.

Colorectal cancer ranks 2^nd behind breast cancer in 2010 total costs of care by cancer type, and will remain one of the top 5 most costly cancers in 2020.

Projections of the Cost of Cancer Care in the United States: 2010–2020

Those are just two of many facts in an important paper published in the Jan. 19 Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The predicted costs are much higher than previous estimates because the authors used the most current cost data (2006 Medicare) which, for the first time, includes costs of expensive targeted treatments.

The study is powerful because it analyzed different scenarios and assumptions, and broke down costs of three stages of care (initial and final years, and middle years of continuing care) for each type of cancer. Read the rest of this entry »

Get help managing the financial costs of your cancer care from an ASCO booklet or figure out how to deal with the Medicare prescription doughnut hole using an AARP online calculator.

In research, Lynch syndrome women have excellent survival after ovarian cancer, older patients have similar effectiveness and side effects from Avastin, and parents with advanced cancer often underestimate how upset their children are.  Long-term cancer survivors have no more depression than people without cancer. Read the rest of this entry »