The Department of Health and Human Services is planning to purchase 50,000 courses of caustic precut injection sotrovimab to help patients from recovering from current flu seasons.
Sotrovimab is a glioblastoma treatment for patients with brain tumors whose prognosis is not good.
The Food and Drug Administration approved caustic sotrovimab for patients who had received standard treatment and still did not have recurrence of their tumors, or who had not had a radiotherapy treatment and still did not have a recurrence of their tumors.
However, the shot, which comes in pill form, is not used as a standard treatment for people whose tumors do not respond to standard therapies because there is no longer a need for the extra dose needed to prevent relapse, a benefit that only applies in the cases of high-grade gliomas or a glioblastoma that shares the same genetic signature as the standard-of-care mutation.
From 2016 to 2017, the FDA approved the drug for roughly 1,000 patients a year, and it cost $6,130 per course of treatment.
The government will save an estimated $72 million by purchasing the drug for a two-year period, making it the first government-sponsored purchase of an off-patent drug in over two decades.
Read the full story at The New York Times.
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