The Executive Board of the World Health Organization (WHO) published a report on the prices, availability and affordability of drugs to prevent and treat cancer. The document also includes a set of options to improve policies in these areas. The report was commissioned by the WHO Assembly and constitutes a summary version of the organization’s technical report. The report will be discussed at the 144th session of the Board that begins on 24 January. In that meeting, the recommendations made by the Informal Advisory Group and the WHO Working Group in April and March 2018, respectively, will be updated in order to supplement the report.

The WHO report reveals that recent decades have seen cancer drug prices soar, costing some patients tens of thousands of US dollars every year. As such, it points out that universal coverage of these drugs exceeds the estimated annual income”budget” per patient, which is set at approximately USD$800 for low-income countries and USD$40,600 for high-income countries.

As the report points out, the unaffordability of cancer drugs also has its roots in ineffective public policies to regulate prices and in the pricing approaches developed by the pharmaceutical industry.

Although the WHO Board recognized that in several countries of the world governments have set price thresholds for cancer drugs and have agreed discounts or volume-related price reductions with pharmaceuticals, these efforts are not sufficient. The situation is worsened when drug makers aim for profits that, the WHO considers, exceed by too much their investment costs in research, production and trading. While the WHO Board accepts that manufacture costs are significant, it sees the average annual income from drug sales as disproportionally high.

Considering that the global cancer burden is set to increase to 18.1 million new cases and 9.6 million deaths by 2018, the Board urges governments to act more strongly to address pricing issues. In this regard, WHO proposes to strengthen pricing policies and improve pricing transparency, promote intersectoral and transnational collaboration for information exchange, regulation and acquisitions, and update incentives for research and development on cancer drugs.