Can cancer medicines be produced more cheaply?
Yesterday I watched the Dutch TV programme De Wereld Draait Door, on which Professor René Bernards and internist and oncologist Jan Schellens sounded the alarm about cancer medicines. According to them, cancer medicines have become unaffordable. These medicines would be much cheaper if the medical world broke away from the ‘traditional’ pharmaceutical industry. According to these experts, that can be done by no longer asking pharmaceutical giants to develop cancer medicines, but to do it under our own control and have them produced by companies that manufacture patent-free medicines.
Treatment for everyone
Bernards and a number of colleagues have published an article about their radical solution in the renowned scientific journal ‘Cell’. I understand why this development is taking place. And it’s not for nothing that the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) has also included this theme in its programme. They propose:
Treatment for everyone: The right of access to high-quality and effective treatment and care, regardless of where people live or of their financial resources.
Saving costs in the production of cancer medicines
Given my involvement in the pharmaceutical industry and the possibilities that I see for saving costs with single-use technology, I’m following this discussion with great interest. After all, the low investment costs of single-use systems make it easier to experiment without immediately having to buy a series of expensive machines. And you no longer have to clean the equipment between the production processes. So with single-use components you also save on cleaning and validation costs. To Mr Bernards and Mr Schellens, this must be very good news if they want to keep the production of cancer medicines under their control.
Medicine geared to specific types of cancer
Medicines are being geared more and more to specific types of cancer / groups of patients. As a consequence, the development of medicines is focusing more and more on small production amounts instead of bulk. Pharmaceutical companies must adapt their production systems to this and control the costs at the same time. Large pharmaceutical companies often lack the flexibility to do this.
Time gain
If single-use systems are deployed in the development and production of cancer medication, we can achieve fast setup times from product to product. With a traditional setup made of steel and glass everything needs to be carefully cleaned between the various production processes. Then the setup must once again be sterilised, reset and recalibrated. This costs time and brings production to a standstill. With single-use, all you need to do is replace the single-use part of the configuration and then carry on working! That’s good news, because besides cost control speed is vitally important in the production of cancer medicines.
I hope that the plan of the cancer experts is successful and that single-use technology can make a modest contribution to it.