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Who gets to “value” new drugs (at least in the UK)?
According to recent news reports (such as this one), the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) will have full responsibility for determining the “value” of all drug...
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More data on accuracy of the PCA3 test in the real world
The prostate cancer gene 3 or PCA3 test has been approved exclusively as a means to assess the potential value of a repeat biopsy for a man who has already had a negative biopsy but whose PSA values...
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To prednisone or not to prednisone? Is that the question?
The past couple of years have seen a resurgence of academic (and clinical) interest in the value of the corticosteroid prednisone in combination with other drugs in the treatment of men with advanced...
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Who decides the “value” of a new cancer drug — and how?
In an interesting wrinkle that may profoundly impact the drug pricing debate here in America, the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO) has decided to “score” the value of new cancer drugs as...
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Early data on the accuracy and potential of the 4Kscore test
The late-breaking abstract for the results of a US-based study of the accuracy of the new 4Kscore Test™ has just been made available on line. (Thank you to one of our correspondents for bringing this...
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Can you help with this study of the value of prostate cancer social networks?
As many regular readers will be aware, The “New” Prostate Cancer InfoLink likes to be able to assist researchers who are studying various aspects of prostate cancer and the use of online educational...
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Urologists recommend AS more often than rad/oncs (but probably not enough)
A new article on the Medscape web site, based on an article by Kim et al. in the journal Medical Care, deals with urologists’ and radiation oncologists’ recommendations for active surveillance (AS) as...
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The increasing high costs of drugs for cancer therapy
The news junkies among our readers probably already know this, but …. Last night, on air and on its web site, 60 Minutes spent 20 of those minutes addressing the increasingly high cost of cancer...
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NICE rejects Provenge as a treatment for mCRPC based on cost
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in the UK has issued a statement that, according to preliminary draft guidelines, it has rejected the use of sipuleucel-T (Provenge) to...
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New tissue analyzer will probably need to do more
According to a report on the ScienceDaily web site this morning, a German company called Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft has developed a prototype of an analytic tissue processor that can reliably distinguish...
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Access to, cost of, and value of high-price prostate (and other) cancer drugs
As all our regular readers will be well aware, it is not enough, in the UK, for a new cancer drug to be approved for use by the European Union and its European Medicines Agency. In England they also...
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A future with too many tests and no comparative data about value?
The role of personalized genetic and genomic testing and the value of such testing to test to accurately and reliably predict things like the appropriateness of active surveillance as a management...
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Prostate cancer screening said to be “not cost effective”
A new review article in Future Oncology has suggested that even when based on favorable randomized controlled trials in younger age groups, prostate cancer screening is still not cost effective. A...
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“Psychosocial interventions in prostate cancer offer limited benefits”
The heading above is the title of a Reuters-generated article on the Medcape Oncology web site. The article is based on a new review article just published in BJU International. Parahoo et al. carried...
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Assessing the “value” of new drugs in the treatment of [prostate] cancer
Yesterday the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) issued the initial draft of “a conceptual framework for assessing the value of new cancer therapies based on treatment benefits, toxicities,...
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New “liquid biopsy” tests of no known value in assessing risk of men for...
The “New” Prostate Cancer InfoLink wishes to very clearly warn its readers about the near to complete lack of any meaningful data — as yet — supporting the use of a new form of test called a “liquid...
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Guessing the future price of the next major breakthrough in prostate cancer...
In an article published on Monday September 28, in Pharmaceutical Executive (a well-known biopharmaceutical industry trade journal) a senior health care public relations executive recently laid out a...
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Assessing the “value” of treatment with specific drugs (here in the USA)
Last Friday, the National Comprehensive Cancer Cancer Network (NCCN) introduced a new way for doctors and patients to be able to consider the clinical “value” of treatment with specific drugs in...
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“Our study confirmed our suspicion” that “these pills were junk.”
According to what appears to have been a pretty forthright presentation at the ongoing annual meeting of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO), many commonly used men’s health and...
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The utility and value of new imaging techniques in advanced prostate cancer
PET/CT scans using the radioactive fluorinated inhibitor of prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) known as 18F-DCFBC (or just DCFBC) are better at detecting metastases in men with metastatic...
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