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I remember when I had my own pharmacy and the drug Mevacor was approved. Mevacor was the first of the anti-cholesteral statin drugs to be aproved and Lipitor is a more modern Statin drug.This was in 1987 and most prescription transactions were cash based ie there as no insurance , copays etc. The drug companies depended on people paying out of pocket so the price had to be what the market would bare. We pharmacists were paying about 89.00 dollars for 60 mevacor tablets and were outraged at the high price, knowing we would be selling this drug below cost with the 55+ senior citizen discount. Four months later Merck raised the price of Mevacor 20mg to an unheard of (at that time-1987) 94 dollars for sity tablets. Getting a new drug approved was extremely expensive and risky for the drug company then as it is today. Things have not changed that drastically as far as the expense of getting a new drug approved by the FDA in 21 years. What has changed is that now that the Insurance companies are paying for the drug, and can afford much more money, the drug companies have drastically raised their prices, sometimes by as much as 100 times as compared to the 1980s pre- insurance era.
There is an approved anti-cancer drug called Sutent which has been approved by the FDA for advanced renal cancer and a rare cancer known as GIST or gastro-intestinal stromal tumour. Sutent works by blocking VEGF and PDGF receptor Tyrosine Kinases and interferes with angiogenesis. The dosage in humans is 50mg daily for a 28 day cycle followed by a 2 week rest period, as the drug can cause severe fatigue, even in mice. The cost (if not insurance approved) for twenty eight 50mg Sutent tablets enough for one cycle) is over 7000 dollars. Sutent is a tablet and I doubt it costs the drug company a penny to make 100 tablets. Of course the research needed to get the drug approved was expensive, very expensive but probably not that much more expensive than the money needed to get Mevacor approved. Yet Mevacor only cost the pharmacist 89.00 for sixty tablets as compared to thousands of dollars as compared to the cost of twenty eight 50mg Sutent tablets. It is a scary situation.
Paul
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