Cost-Effectiveness of Cancer Drugs Is Questioned

The widespread use of expensive cancer drugs to prolong patients’ lives by just weeks or months was called into question by an article published Monday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Crunching data from published studies, the authors found that treating a lung-cancer patient with Erbitux, a drug that costs $80,000 for an 18-week regimen, prolongs survival by only 1.2 months.

Based on that estimate, extending the lives of the 550,000 Americans who die of cancer annually by one year would then cost $440 billion, they extrapolated.