Toward Value-Based Pricing to Boost Cancer Research and Innovation

The high market price of new anticancer agents has stimulated debate about the long-term sustainability of healthcare systems and whether these new agents can continue to be supported by public healthcare or by private insurers. In addition, some drugs have been approved with limited clinical benefit, raising concerns about setting a minimum requirement for medical benefit. Options to resolve these problems include raising the bar for approval of new drugs and/or pricing of new agents based on the medical benefit that they offer to patients. In this commentary, we suggest that new agents should be marketed in a two-step process that would include first the approval of the new drug by the regulatory agencies and second the introduction of a market price based on the medical benefit that the new intervention offers to patients. Introduction of value-based pricing would maintain the sustainability of health care systems and would improve drug development, as it would pressure pharmaceutical companies to become more innovative and avoid the development of compounds with limited benefit. Value-based pricing could also stimulate the funding of research directed to development of new anticancer drugs with novel mechanisms of action. (C) 2016 AACR.