Despite considerable progress in the discovery and development of new cancer drugs, there are significant disparities in both the availability and timeliness of these medicines worldwide, with poorer countries missing out, suggests a global analysis of new drug launches between 1990 and 2022, published in the open access journal BMJ Global Health . Few new cancer drugs were launched in lower-middle or low income countries, and the gap between rich and poor nations widened over the three decades, the analysis shows. Such inequities may help explain poor cancer outcomes in many countries, particularly those on the lower end of the income scale, suggest the researchers.
The evidence to date on country differences in the availability of new cancer drugs has usually focused on one region of the world and included only a small sample of drugs, they point out. To obtain a broader international picture of the scale of the issue, the researchers analyzed the availability of all commercially developed cancer drugs from 1990 through to the end of 2022. To do this, they drew on information from Pharmaprojects, a commercial database that tracks global pharmaceutical Research & Development activities in more than 150 countries.
They focused on the first launch in each country of a new cancer drug , irrespective of its therapeutic indication, and the date it first became available for treatment in that country. They used data from the World Bank to group countries according to population si.