According to specialists from the National Cancer Institute, the latest changes in drug reimbursement for oncology patients touch on several important aspects, but first and foremost are signals that the gap between the availability of modern therapies in Poland and other European countries is narrowing.
The new reimbursement list includes preparations for relatively common oncological diseases, such as second-line treatment of patients with ovarian cancer and therapies for rare oncological diseases. Here, an example is acalabrutinib used for chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients with a specific biological subtype of the disease - In rare oncological diseases, establishing a cost-effectiveness threshold is usually very difficult, and the process of determining the availability of such treatments can be a multi-year process. For this reason, reimbursement of drugs in rare cancers is particularly important for reference centers such as the NIO," assesses Beata Jagielska, MD, director of the NIO-PIB
The current changes to the individual provisions of drug programs, i.e. the mechanisms of individual reimbursements, expand the availability of treatment for oncology patients. What is exceptionally important is that the new reimbursements give us physicians greater flexibility in selecting treatment depending on the patient's condition and expectations, thus allowing the physician to personalize therapy in a real way," explains Professor Lucjan Wyrwicz Deputy Director for Open Treatment and Head of the Institute's Department of Oncology and Radiotherapy.
The reimbursement list will also include expanded access to classic chemotherapy drugs. Oral chemotherapy with capecitabine may be an alternative to the implementation of treatment with prolonged infusions of cytostatics. In the current reimbursement list, the indications for the aforementioned capecitabine have been expanded to include cancers in which international recommendations have supported the use of oral chemotherapy for years, but this solution was not previously included in the list of reimbursement indications in Poland.
Such therapy allows the so-called inversion of the pyramid of services in oncology - fewer hospital stays, a higher percentage of patients treated on a same-day or outpatient basis, explains Beata Jagielska, MD.
The expansion of the reimbursement indication for another drug, oxaliplatin for the treatment of esophageal cancer, is due to a growing body of scientific data, including data created with input from National Cancer Institute teams, that this chemotherapy component can replace the use of older forms of chemotherapy in esophageal cancer patients, including when chemotherapy is used in combination with targeted drugs.
Professor Piotr Rutkowski, head of the Department of Soft Tissue, Bone and Melanoma Tumors at NIO-PIB, is particularly pleased by the appearance of a new therapy on the reimbursement list for patients with advanced melanoma of the skin and mucous membranes - combination immunotherapy using nivolumab with relatlimab is the first systemic treatment based on a new mode of immunotherapy targeting the so-called LAG-3, i.e. one of the mechanisms responsible for depleting the function of tumor-fighting lymphocytes. This treatment has shown better efficacy than stand-alone immunotherapy, while being associated with less toxicity than the association of anti-PD-1 with anti-CTLA-4. This is good news for our patients," explains the expert professor. It is worth noting that the National Cancer Institute participated in the clinical trials with our patients that led to the registration of this important therapy," summarizes the information about the new reimbursable therapies from Professor Rutkowski, who at the NIO is also the director's representative for the National Oncology Strategy and Clinical Trials.
Source: National Cancer Institute
