ICERs and Drug Costs in Oncology, UK

Pharmaceutical companies and Cancer Research centers are spending billions every year on innovating new treatments and the pipelines of most of the pharmaceuticals companies through the last decade full of molecules that shown potential in fighting cancer. However, only six drugs submitted to NICE to be assessed in 2013, is not that odd? Pharmaceutical companies continuously argue that the high prices of the new products are essential to fund the future R&D and also the NICE threshold value does not take into account the whole picture especially the deteriorated health state of the cancer patients and needs to be adjusted either to higher values or to have more flexibility depending on the cancer type and cancer stage. On the other hand, NICE argues back that the pharmaceutical companies put a monopolistic price tag to their products way higher than what they need to fund R&D and sustain profitability. Focusing on the UK; this book will investigate only on the three most common cancers in men are prostate (25.6 %), lung (13.7 %) and colorectal (13.6 %).While the three most common cancers for women are breast (31.2 %), lung (11.4 %) and colorectal (11.0 %).