Drugs: costs explode in the United States

The price of some drugs is now in thousands of euros. This is the case of Daraprim (pyrimethamine), the cost of which rose from $ 13.5 (€ 12) to $ 750 (€ 673) after its takeover by the start-up Turing Pharmaceuticals… An increase of 5,000% . Never seen. In the United States, where the remaining charge is important, a real scandal has erupted.

The wave of anger reached Hillary Clinton. The Democratic presidential candidate denounced a scandalous maneuver. The CEO of Turing, Martin Shkreli, for his part, argues the need to generate profits to finance the search for new molecules. And he is not the only one to inflate the price of drugs. An independent study, conducted by the University of Liverpool (United Kingdom) and revealed by Reuters, explains that Americans spend much more than their European peers. Cancer drugs are the first to be affected by this phenomenon, as the researchers will explain at the next congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) – to be held in Vienna (Austria) from September 25 to 29.

The price doubles crossing the Atlantic

Across the Atlantic, new cancer drugs can be worth up to 600 times their production cost. Andrew Hill, who led the investigation, uses tyrosine kinase inhibitors as an example. This class of drugs has fewer side effects than chemotherapy. It is therefore in great demand. But in the United States, the expense required to buy them is twice as high as in Europe.

Beyond the cost of production, marketing plays an important role in increasing the final price. But for Jean-Paul Vernant, professor of hematology at the Pitié hospital-Salpêtrière (Paris), it is the value of the treatment for patients and for the health system that influences its labeling. “For the pharmaceutical industry, the justification for a high price is no longer the cost of research and development, but the usefulness of the drug,” he explains to Why doctor. There is no other industry that has such practices: can we imagine that the manufacturers of airbags define the price of these only according to the number of lives that they save? In reality, what defines the price of drugs is the assessment that the laboratory makes of the capacity of states to pay. The Sovaldi (Gilead) is the perfect example: the bill for 12 weeks of treatment is 41,000 euros in France, against 84,000 dollars (60,000 euros) in the United States. The laboratory then explained to adjust the price according to the level of income of the countries.

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