EMN 2018 | Cost-effectiveness of MM treatment

I had a talk here on cost and effectiveness of myeloma treatment because I think this is an issue – although I’m a medical doctor and not a financial expert – that everybody is touching upon. This is getting increasing interest because we’re using combos so combination treatment on the one hand and treatment costs are quite substantial so I think this was an important talk and a relevant talk, though for medical doctors also a difficult talk. There’s quite a bit of data around actually, and I try to pull that together. The central points were that costs are quite different from different European countries that you look at, so I looked at 16 different European countries, and others have performed this likewise, and there is variation in the costs of drug prices as well as for example for Medicare. So the U.S. data of prices as well as compared to Europe are also quite different, and so to look at that issue on the one hand and also trying to find solutions of how we handle this and how good should be the quality of life and the benefit of a patient of a specific drug regimen for us to use it and what is the price of incremental cost we are producing and what is tolerable for our system, I think those are issues that are being covered more and more in the future. I certainly don’t have the solution but it was a stimulating talk and a stimulating topic also I think for me and probably others to come and that we should probably dig into it a little further.