Coordinated Institute of Management and Applied Economics denounced this Thursday that there is ” lack of equity and significant backlog in access to oncology innovations in Spain”.

“Although nationally and internationally, therapeutic innovations have experienced great progress in recent decades, access to the latest medicines, as well as territorial inequality have become major barriers for cancer patients; but it is also frustrating for the medical professionals who communicate with them day by day and closely monitor their illness,” the organization said in a statement.

Instituto Coordinadas Executive Vice President Jesús Sánchez Lambas said that “specialists know firsthand that the time factor is essential to achieve the best results when a patient receives the appropriate therapy for their disease.”

Instituto Coordinadas pointed out that “despite the fact that patient survival rates have doubled in recent years and are likely to continue to rise, Cancer is the second leading cause of death in Spain”.

He stressed that there have been significant advances in the innovation of new treatments and medicines, but argues that the time frames for access to them are very long compared to other countries in our environment, “even between autonomous communities” when it comes to choice. for them, “which makes the delay in access to approval and the lack of fairness the two main obstacles in Spain.”

Based on the information you provided, it is assumed that Spain to have 280,101 new cancer cases in 2022with 160,066 men and 120,035 women in particular, the most commonly diagnosed cancers are colorectal, breast, lung, prostate and bladder, according to the Cancer in Spain 2022 report prepared by the Spanish Society of Medical Oncology (SEOM).

“These figures place cancer as the second leading cause of death in our country, where dozens of drugs are pending approval despite being approved in other European countries. Thus, the challenge is not only to help the thousands of cancer patients that we have today, but also in the future. change the procedure so that patients can get faster access to a series of innovations that would allow them to improve their survival, improve their quality of life and, in some cases, achieve a cure,” the Instituto Coordinadas said in a statement.

new drugs

In this context, it states that about half of the new medicines approved in Europe “do not reach Spain”, according to a study by Efpia, the European Federation of the Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, which shows a significant disparity among 39 European countries analyzed when incorporating innovative methods treatment. An example of this, points out Instituto Coordinadas, is that patients from Eastern and Southern Europe have to wait six times longer than patients from the north and west to access these treatments.

The Ministry of Health, he adds, “reaffirmed in Parliament shortly thereafter that the procedure followed in our country is based on” a preliminary assessment both therapeutically and economically. “An objective and rigorous assessment of the available scientific evidence on fundamental aspects such as the clinical benefit of a drug and its cost-effectiveness to support decisions about the value a drug provides and its impact on the budget.”

In this sense, Jesus Sanchez-Lambas claims that many treatments have “significantly changed the course of many types of cancer.”and although they can be costly in some cases, the improvement that their use in patients entails justifies and offsets the cost.”

Many of these treatments have shown good results in various clinical trials for various types of cancer, the organization says.

Incidence

In Spain, they are detected annually about 10,000 cases of lymphoma6,000 for leukemia and 3,000 for multiple myeloma, with a gradual increase in survival due to early diagnosis due to knowledge of molecular markers and advanced therapeutic targets.

The Coordenadas Institute claims that CAR-T has indicated before and after treatment for this type of blood cancer, improving survival and quality of life for patients.

“Good news that happens in parallel with others, for example, the number of centers authorized to provide this type of therapy has recently doubled. However, despite all the progress made, the Spanish health bureaucracy is slowing down – up to 2 years – the issuance of approvals in our country for drugs that have proven their effectiveness and are already approved for use in Europe, ”he adds.

Other pathologies, he continues, are also having a particularly difficult time, as in the case of lung cancer, “where drugs for this tumor, such as atezolizumab, one of the most aggressive and difficult to treat subtypes of lung cancer, took months to be available in Spain. The same is true for colorectal cancer, where there are drugs like encorafenib + cetuximab that have EMA approval but are not funded in Spain.”

While other countries already have approved treatments for these conditions, according to the organization, “in our case, they are still unapproved and unfunded, leaving thousands of patients particularly vulnerable.”

“But perhaps the most complex and striking case is metastatic breast cancer,” he says. “In Spain, about 30% of cancers diagnosed in women originate in the breast and it is the leading cause of death among people aged 35 to 50. While it is true that, in general terms, this is the one with the longest survival, there are some particularly aggressive subtypes, such as metastatic ones, that usually have a particularly poor prognosis.”

However, he states that while there are already therapeutic options allowed in Europe, they are not approved in Spain. “Some, such as scituzumab govitecan for metastatic triple-negative breast cancer, trastuzumab derukstecan for HER2+ metastatic breast cancer, or olaparib for BRCA germline-mutated HER2 metastatic breast cancer, treatments are already available in other nearby European countries such as France or Italy. “. he complains.

“This situation affects not only patients, but also causes frustration for oncologists themselves, who are frustrated that they know about therapies that can change the lives of their patients, but cannot apply them,” says Jesús Sánchez-Lambas. According to Epfia’s latest report, in Spain, patients only have access to just over half of the drugs authorized in Europe over the past four years, and it takes more than 500 days to do so, data, not opinion, that shows a regressive trend. and how acute the problem of patients’ access to new medicines has become.