RespiteMatch.com Health Blog

Cancer lobbyists and patients are crying foul over a Pharmac decision to deny funding for the breast cancer drug Herceptin.

Pharmac claims there is insufficient clinical data to ensure Herceptin’s safety.

But critics say that is just an excuse and are convinced Pharmac has backed away because of the cost.

Pharmac has defended the decision.

“At this time the data does not provide sufficient certainty of the long-term benefits of Herceptin or its impact on life expectancy to justify committing taxpayer funding to Herceptin,” says Pharmac’s Dr Dilke Rasiah.

But it is an answer more than 300 New Zealand women with early stage so-called HER2-positive breast cancer prayed they would not hear.

“I feel very frustrated and very angry for those women who’s lives have just been put in the rubbish bin basically by Pharmac,” says Ann Hayden, the leader of a petition on the issue.

Pharmac insists the door is not closed, and it is keen to review more clinical data.

But it is a shock to patients like Amanda Rudd, especially since an international trial has shown Herceptin would cut the chance of her breast cancer recurring by nearly half.

“I’m extremely disappointed in that decision,” she says.

Rudd needs Herceptin by October.

“It has proven benefits that it could potentially save my life. So I’d like to have it. And finding $130,000 is a really tough call.”

Pharmac and the DHBs deny they have backed away from funding Herceptin due to it is $25 million annual price tag. But critics say that has got to be the main reason. Funding it would nearly double the existing national cancer drugs budget overnight.

“Don’t tell me it’s something to do with trials because the latest international trial has come out overwhelmingly in favour of this. So I really don’t understand,” says Dr Belinda Scott of the Breast Cancer Foundation.

Pharmac did give a sign on Friday of it’s own frustration with drug company charges.

“Not many years ago a medicine at 20 to $30,000 a year we used to consider expensive,” Rasiah says. “Now we’re looking at the 70 up to $100,000 dollars a year and the question we have to ask is why that cost?”

But the decision leaves New Zealand lagging behind other countries like the UK, Italy, Switzerland and Australia who are funding it, or look set to.

Scott says she thinks it is a very short-sighted decision.

“I think it doesn’t show very much humanity and really very distressing.”

Critics say the fact it has also been given a low to medium funding priority means it will now be months, perhaps years before Herceptin is available.