Advancing from “occasional cures” to “routine cures”

On the blog's Current News today I compared an article in The Australian from last month, April 2016, "Melanoma drug Keytruda denied full listing on PBS," to one in The ABC from June 2015, about a year later, "'Revolutionary' melanoma drug worth $150,000 a year listed on PBS, saving Australian patients thousands."

Last year, Australian patients with advanced melanoma gained access to Merck & Co.'s anti-PD-1 or immune checkpoint inhibitor drug pembrolizumab (Keytruda) following its initial, "partial" listing on the country's Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS). This year Keytruda was denied full listing on the PBS because there was insufficient evidence of clinical benefit to justify its cost — with The Australian calling Keytruda "a much-hyped melanoma drug."

The above dialog from Australia is one part of an ongoing, maturing, global discussion with respect to this topic: whether current “revolutionary” drugs are truly revolutionary, and ultimately worth the requested price. A paragraph from The Australian's article goes to the very heart of this topic:

"The knock-back comes less than a year after the PBAC flagged concerns about a “substantial mismatch” between the public’s expectations for the so-called “breakthrough drug” and the supporting scientific data." [PBAC is Australia's Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee]

Keytruda (aka lambrolizumab) received the FDA's breakthrough therapy designation (BTD) for advanced melanoma in 2013.

Since the beginning of 2016 there has been an increasing realization that declaring “mission accomplished” in the fight against cancer might be premature. At the Vatican's recent 2016 healthcare conference, Cellular Horizons: How Science, Technology, Information and Communication will Impact Society, it was noted that the current immuno-oncology (I-O) drugs lead to “occasional cures,” but that this outcome is not good enough. Part-and-parcel with this view is the realization that combinations — combinations of different cancer treatments, whether therapies or therapeutics — likely will be paramount to advancing from occasional cures to routine cures.

The global oncology community is actually now talking about cures, realizes the immune system is crucial for this (as was first noted by the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer in 2013), and is looking at cancer with a markedly increased sophistication in the search for necessary treatment algorithms for various tumors and tumor subtypes.

As with the rest of the oncology community, Provectus has challenges ahead, but PV-10 appears to be congruent with the mainstream more and more daily.

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