Advances in Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety

Abstract

Cost-effectiveness Considerations of Individualized Cancer Chemotherapy

Da-Yong Lu, Ting Ren Lu and Hong-Ying Wu

The running cost for clinical cancer treatment has risen dramatically. It is a huge burden to government fiscal budgets and cancer patients’ medical expenditure. Previously, we often create new drug and methodology of high cost and waste human resources for development of many less effects and expensive anticancer drugs or other sophisticated methodologies. These efforts will greatly increase therapeutic costs. Now some countries, such as USA or Japan, are overburden with high expense of medical resources in human diagnosis and therapy, especially for human cancer therapy. One of the major obstacles to controlling cancer growth and metastases is the inappropriate use of anticancer drugs. Treatment using individualized cancer chemotherapy (ICC) has been attracting increasing attention and will continue to show beneficial outcomes in the future. Increasing efforts to develop ICC strategies are generally paralleled with rising fee of diagnostic and prediction of drug responses and expense of anticancer drugs. Systematic evaluation of the relationship between the running costs and benefits of ICC is crucial for updating the ICC systems and making it available in the long run. In this editorial, we address and discuss this matter from different angels.