My Malignant Melanoma

So we have some new effective drugs for MM which have been free to patients during the clinical trials, but back in the real world, I hear they are likely to cost about £75,000 for a course of treatment.

NICE thinks a quality adjusted year of life is worth around £30,000, so the drugs would have to provide at least a couple of years of good quality life to get past NICE (which they don't on average)

Better start the petition now!

Phase III trial results are in for PLX4032, and they are looking pretty good:  In the study, the risk of death was reduced by 63 percent for people who received vemurafenib compared to those who received chemotherapy. In addition, vemurafenib significantly reduced the risk of the disease getting worse by 74 percent compared to chemotherapy.

Labels: Clinical, PLX4032, Trial, vemurafenib

Remember when I said that it was unlikely that big pharma companies would collaborate to bring us combinations of the effective new Melanoma treatments? I'm glad to report that Bristol Myers and Roche have proven me wrong with their newly announced collaboration, to combine Roche's BRAF inhibitor PLX4032 (now known as Vemurafenib) with ipilimumab (now known as Yervoy) in Phase III trials.