Integrating treatment cost reduction strategies and biomarker research to reduce costs and personalize expensive treatments: an example of a self-funding trial in non-small cell lung cancer

Alessandra I G Buma; Berber Piet; Rob Ter Heine; Michel M van den Heuvel

doi:10.3389/fphar.2023.1274532

Integrating treatment cost reduction strategies and biomarker research to reduce costs and personalize expensive treatments: an example of a self-funding trial in non-small cell lung cancer

Front Pharmacol. 2023 Nov 28:14:1274532. doi: 10.3389/fphar.2023.1274532. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Alessandra I G Buma¹, Berber Piet¹, Rob Ter Heine², Michel M van den Heuvel¹

Affiliations

¹ Radboud University Medical Centre, Department of Respiratory Medicine, Nijmegen, Netherlands.
² Radboud University Medical Centre, Department of Pharmacy, Nijmegen, Netherlands.

Abstract

Personalization of treatment offers the opportunity to treat patients more effectively based on their dominant disease-specific features. The increasing number and types of treatment, and the high costs associated with these treatments, however, demand new approaches that improve patient selection while reducing treatment-associated costs to ensure sustainable healthcare. The DEDICATION-1 trial has been designed to investigate the non-inferiority of lower dosing regimens when compared to standard of care dosing regimens as a potential effective treatment cost reduction strategy to reduce costs of treatment with expensive immune checkpoint inhibitors in non-small cell lung cancer. If non-inferiority is confirmed, lower dosing regimens could be implemented for all therapeutic indications of pembrolizumab. The cost savings obtained within the trial are partly reinvested in biomarker research to improve the personalization of pembrolizumab treatment. The implementation of these biomarkers will potentially lead to additional cost savings by preventing ineffective pembrolizumab exposure, thereby further reducing the financial pressure on healthcare systems. The concepts discussed within this perspective can be applied both to other anticancer agents, as well as to treatments prescribed outside the oncology field.

Keywords: biomarker research; expensive treatment; personalized treatment; sustainable healthcare; treatment cost reduction strategies.

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. The DEDICATION-1 trial is conducted with funding of Stichting Treatmeds. The funder was not involved in the study design, collection, analysis, interpretation of data, the writing of this article, or the decision to submit it for publication.