The gap between rich and poor countries has increased since the 1990s as new drugs become available in higher-income regions but not in the rest of the world. Advances in cancer treatments are emerging rapidly, with 197 new drugs launching from 2018 to 2022 alone – but while high-income countries are reaping the benefits, most of the world is being left behind, a major new analysis has found. A total of 568 cancer drugs entered the market in 111 countries between 1990 and 2022, most of them within the last decade.
Many treatments were first introduced in high-income countries, with lower-income regions facing long delays – if the drugs ever became available there at all, according to the study, published in the journal . These gaps have widened since the 1990s, meaning that while people in wealthy countries are more likely than ever to receive new cancer treatments, access remains stagnant in lower-income areas. “It started from 2000 onwards, where there are many new drugs, and it is now just quite an explosion,” Carin Uyl-de Groot, a professor of health technology assessment at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands who was not involved with the new study, told Euronews Health.
But “there's the layer of access, and there's a link to income”. The United States had the most new cancer drugs made available (345) from 1990 to 2022, followed by Japan (224), Canada (221), Australia (204), the United Kingdom (191), and China (169). Other western European countr.