Drug companies will earn $1.8 billion this year from cancer drugs that patients never take

A better way to package drugs — and save money

Bach argues that this much leftover medication is pricey and unnecessary. As a counterexample to Velcade, he points to Treanda, a leukemia drug manufactured by Teva Pharmaceuticals.

Teva sells its drug in 25, 45, 100, and 180 milligram vials. This means that providers can essentially mix and match the different vials to more closely match the dosage their patients need.

You can see in this graph below how the different dosage combinations of Treanda (also known by the name of its active ingredient, bendamustine hydrochloride) overlay with the population of patients. The red bars show all the possible combinations of Treanda with those different-size vials.

vaccine 3

This graph looks really different from the Velcade one; it shows that there are lots of dosage combinations. And that means less drug waste: Bach estimates about only 1 percent of all Treanda gets thrown out.

“When there are drugs where 30 percent are wasted and drugs with only 1 percent waste, its inconceivable that drug companies don’t know about this,” Bach says. “These are extremely sophisticated businesses. They know everything about the patients getting their drugs, and certainly have the capability to figure out what we’ve described in this paper.”

There are, however, risks to combining dosages: Using more than one vial of medication does leave more space for math errors on the part of the provider. This is why the FDA generally encourages single vials that have enough medication to treat a patient.

If the FDA wanted to go further, it could more strictly regulate vial size — looking for dosages that are enough to treat the average patient but not so large that they lead to significant waste.

And this is something that PhRMA, the trade group for drug companies, did express some openness toward.

“Manufacturers are committed to working with FDA and Congress … to modify their products as we learn about the safety, efficacy and manufacturing of new medicines from the real world clinical setting,” PhRMA spokesperson Allyson Funk said in a statement.

Article Appeared @http://www.vox.com/2016/3/7/11172550/drug-waste-pharma

 

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