Pharmac still stalled on lung cancer drug

Pharmac has not revoked its decision to look at funding lung cancer drugs. Photo / NZME

Lung cancer sufferers are still waiting on Pharmac to reverse a decision made more than a year ago to freeze plans to fund drugs that could help at least 1400 patients a year.

Advocates had been calling on the state drug buyer to fund Keytruda as a treatment for people with lung cancer.

They nearly got what they wanted last year when Pharmac told the Lung Foundation it would offer a Request for Proposals, or RFP, to drug companies, asking them to put products forward to potentially be funded.

Pharmac was looking for proposals for immune checkpoint inhibitors for lung cancer - a category that would have included Keytruda.

However, in a letter to the lung foundation in April 2020, Pharmac said it was forced to pull that plan given "uncertainty" around the availability of its budget, thanks to pandemic-related additional costs.

It said the RFP was "on hold until such time as we are confident that there is sufficient funds for these treatments".

A lot has changed since then, not least a $200 million increase in Pharmac's budget (spread over the next four years), funded in Budget 2021. Despite this funding injection, Pharmac's position on the RFP has remained the same.

Lung Foundation chief executive Philip Hope now wants Pharmac to get back to its original plan to open an RFP to get the ball rolling for lung cancer drugs.

Pharmac already funds Keytruda for people with melanoma, and the drug is available to Kiwis lung cancer patients, but they have to fund it themselves.

Hope said it gives patients "more time".

He said a course of Keytruda currently costs about $60,000, not including the cost of actually administering the drug.

He said Pharmac's investment had occurred in other cancers, not lung cancer - that's despite lung cancer being New Zealand's biggest cancer killer.

"The investment has happened into other cancers, not lung cancer. At the end of the day other cancers have had innovative treatments funded and lung cancer has not," Hope said.

Pharmac's director of operations Lisa Williams said that the organisation was "disappointed that we couldn't progress the RFP as we had planned; this was due to uncertainty associated with Covid-19".

Willisams said Pharmac currently funds four different medicines - pemetrexed, gefitinib, erlotinib and alectinib - specifically for treating lung cancer.

She said that there were currently a number of applications for lung cancer treatments before Pharmac, including atezolizumab, durvalumab, nivolumab and pembrolizumab (which is branded as Keytruda).

"These have all been ranked on our Options for Investment list, which means they are medicines that we would like to fund, when there is budget available," she said.

A review into Pharmac, which did not include whether it was funded appropriately, delivered an interim report earlier this month.

The report was critical of a lack of transperency at the organisation, and found it had a "fortress mentality".