$3 billion worth cancer drugs wasted due to package size ?

An article in CNN.com titled “Why is $3 billion worth of cancer drugs being thrown away?” describes the 100 mg doses of the drug Keytruda, sold by Merck, and the 140 mg treatment requirement for a single patient, that leaves wasted leftover in the second vial used. If the patient volume is not high, the leftover medicine is wasted.The article describes lower wastage when drugs are available in multiple dosage sizes, thus enabling a better match with demand. What incentives should be provided to drug manufacturers to work to decrease drug wastage ? Should drugs be produced in much smaller vial sizes so that multiple vials may be required for a single dose across patient sizes? Should patients be charged only for the drugs used or also for the drugs wasted ?

About aviyer2010

Professor
This entry was posted in Capacity, consumer, Cost, hospital, ordering, Prices, product, Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s