Vital cancer drugs 'could be too costly to produce'

A new generation of drugs that could revolutionise the treatment of some of the most lethal cancers might never be made widely available because pharmaceutical companies find them too expensive to develop, a scientist said yesterday.

The drugs attack specific genetic mutations that cause a certain kind of cancer. But because each treatment was designed for a relatively small number of people, drug companies could not recover their development costs, said Keith Snell, scientific secretary of the Institute of Cancer Research in London.

Although many cancer specialists believe so-called targeted therapy is the most promising development for many years, the huge cost of testing each potential drug might mean cancer patients will never benefit from the medical revolution.

To take a potential drug through the early stages of safety testing and registration can cost up to £60m and even then many fail at the final hurdles. Only mass-market drugs could make profits big enough to recoup the costs, Dr Snell told the British Association's Science Festival in Leicester.

"Only one in 10 of those drugs developed make it to market. So it costs upwards of £500m to sell a drug. If the potential market is too small there is no way the development costs of that drug will be recovered by sales," Dr Snell said.

The rationale behind the cancer genome project is to identify specific differences in the genes of tumour cells with the genes of ordinary, healthy cells. If the effect of those mutations could be corrected by drugs, that would open the possibility of treating the root causes of a cancer.

Cancer is primarily a genetic disease caused by mutations in critical genes controlling the division of a cell. Scientists have mounted a massive effort to identify these mutations, which will be different for each sub-group of patients. This year, British researchers funded by the Wellcome Trustidentified a mutation in the BRAF cancer gene that causes an aggressively malignant skin cancer.

But Dr Snell said one inevitable consequence of this type of approach was that each specific therapy would be directed against a relatively small sub-group of cancer patients who may all be treated with one drug. "So how are pharmaceutical companies going to be persuaded to take it on?" he said. "Quite frankly many of them are pulling out of cancer because there is not enough money to be made even to realise their costs, never mind make a profit.

"If this conundrum is not solved the chances of getting these new molecular target therapies into the cancer patients who need them is slim. This wonderful new approach, unfortunately, rests on economic considerations.

"The only way forward is to share the [financial] costs of cancer drug development among the big pharma, the niche biotechnology companies and academia. They can each take on different facets of the process and try to make it an economic proposition."