Background: To determine the magnitude of difference between manufacturer-submitted and pan-Canadian Oncology Drug Review (pCODR) calculated incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs), incremental cost (ΔC), and incremental effectiveness (&D...
New oncology drugs undergo detailed review prior to public funding in a single-payer healthcare system. The aim of this study was to assess how cancer drug review times impact funding recommendations. Drugs reviewed by the pan-Canadian Oncology Drug...
JSH: In July 2011, the pan-Canadian Oncology Drug Review [pcodr (http://www.pcodr.ca/)] began accepting submissions by pharmaceutical manufacturers and clinician-based tumour groups to have cancer drugs reimbursed by provincial payers in Canada. Does...
21 July 2016
The pan-Canadian Oncology Drug Review (pCODR) makes recommendations to Canada's provinces and territories (except Quebec) to guide their cancer drug funding decisions. The objective of this paper is to explore, using an economic perspective and the p...
In this interview with the patient representatives on the Expert Review Committee (pERC) of the Pan-Canadian Oncology Drug Review (pCODR), those representatives offer their views about how to be a valuable contributing member of Canada’s national can...
Background: The pan-Canadian Oncology Drug Review (pcodr) was implemented in 2011 to address uneven drug coverage and lack of transparency with respect to the various provincial cancer drug review processes in Canada. We evaluated the impact of the p...
The oncology drug review process for public funding in Canada (Figure 1) encompasses both. [...]
In any given week, media headlines publicize the benefits of a new “breakthrough” cancer drug, with patients and clinicians subsequently advocating for its use. [...]
Quality pharmacological treatment can improve survival in many types of cancer. Drug repurposing offers advantages in comparison with traditional drug development procedures, reducing time and risk. This systematic review identified the most recent r...
Anticancer treatment efficacy is limited by the development of refractory tumor cells characterized by increased expression and activity of mechanisms promoting survival, proliferation, and metastatic spread. The present review summarizes the current...
Oncology conditions are increasingly defined by their molecular profiles, and drug repurposing exploits this new evidence to identify new therapeutic uses of authorized/investigational medicinal products outside their original indication(s). This sco...
The pan-Canadian Oncology Drug Review (PCODR) is responsible for making coverage recommendations to provincial and territorial drug plans about cancer drugs. Within the pcodr process, small groups of experts (including public representatives) conside...
Antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) have transitioned from clinically marginal agents into a defining therapeutic class for solid tumor oncology. In DESTINY-Breast03, trastuzumab deruxtecan achieved a four-fold progression-free survival advantage over tr...
Effective drug delivery in oncology is challenged by a hierarchy of biological barriers—from abnormal vasculature and dense stroma to cellular immunosuppression and specialized interfaces like the blood–brain barrier. This review provides...
Marine natural products are a discerning arena to search for the future generation of medications to treat a spectrum of ailments. Meanwhile, cancer is becoming more ubiquitous over the world, and the likelihood of dying from it is rising. Surgery, r...
Drug resistance (DR) is the major limiting factor in the successful treatment of systemic neoplasia with cytotoxic chemotherapy. DR can be either intrinsic or acquired, and although the development and clinical implications are different, the underly...
During the 3rd congress of the European Society of Pharmacogenomics and Personalised Therapy (ESPT) in Budapest in 2015, a preliminary meeting was held aimed at establishing a pediatric individualized treatment in oncology and hematology committees....
Background: We examined how conditional market approval of cancer pharmaceuticals by Health Canada (hc) affects public funding recommendations by the pan-Canadian Oncology Review (pcodr). We were also interested to see how often hc conditions are enf...
In the last decade, the tremendous improvement in the sensitivity and also affordability of liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) has revolutionized its application in pharmaceutical analysis, resulting in widespread employment of...
Background: Cancer drug-funding decisions between provinces shows discordance. The pan-Canadian Oncology Drug Review (PCODR) was implemented in 2011 partly to address uneven drug coverage and lack of transparency in the various provincial cancer drug...
The medical research field has been tremendously galvanized to improve the prediction of therapy efficacy by the revolution in artificial intelligence (AI). An earnest desire to find better ways to predict the effectiveness of therapy with the use of...
Public reimbursement systems face the challenge of balancing provision of needed treatments and the reality of limited resources. Canada has a complex system for drug approval and public reimbursement, with jurisdiction divided between the federal go...
1 April 2022
The price of cancer drugs has skyrocketed, yet it is not clear whether their value is commensurate with their price. More cancer drugs are approved under expedited review, which considers less rigorous clinical evidence, yet only 20% of them show an...
Raman spectroscopy is a technique which involves quantitative and qualitative molecular analysis based on the interaction between incident light and isolation of scattered wavelengths in generating a molecular fingerprint. It has a broad array of pot...
Background/Objectives: The blood–brain barrier (BBB) severely limits the intratumoral delivery of systemically administered therapeutics in diffuse gliomas, including glioblastoma (GBM), contributing to the persistently poor prognosis of these...
HER2, a member of the Erythroblastosis Protein B/Human Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (ErbB/HER) family of receptor tyrosine kinase, is overexpressed in 20~30% of human breast cancers. Trastuzumab, a HER2-targeted therapeutic monoclonal antibody, w...
An article in this issue by Srikanthan, [...]
As many novel cancer therapies continue to emerge, the field of Cardio-Oncology (or onco-cardiology) has become crucial to prevent, monitor and treat cancer therapy-related cardiovascular toxicity. Furthermore, given the narrow therapeutic window of...
Typically, antibody–drug conjugates (ADCs) are made up of a humanized antibody and a small-molecule medication connected by a chemical linker. ADCs’ ability to deliver cytotoxic agents to the specific site with reduced side effects showed...
Real-world evidence (RWE) is health and outcomes data generated from a patient’s journey through the health care system or disease process (i.e., real-world data). RWE is now having an increasingly important role in regulatory/reimbursement dec...
Repurposing drugs in oncology consists of using off-label drugs that are licensed for various non-oncological medical conditions to treat cancer. Repurposing drugs has the advantage of using drugs that are already commercialized, with known mechanism...
Antibody therapies with high efficiency and low toxicity are becoming one of the major approaches in antibody therapeutics. Based on high-throughput sequencing and increasing experimental structures of antibodies/antibody-antigen complexes, computati...
African green monkey (AGM) spumaretroviruses have been less well-studied than other simian foamy viruses (SFVs). We report the biological and genomic characterization of SFVcae_FV2014, which was the first foamy virus isolated from an African green mo...
Both EGFR and VEGFR2 frequently overexpress in TNBC and cooperate with each other in autocrine and paracrine manner to enhance tumor growth and angiogenesis. Therapeutic mAbs targeting EGFR (cetuximab) and VEGFR2 (ramucirumab) are approved by FDA for...
The development of novel therapeutics in neuro-oncology faces significant challenges, often marked by high costs and low success rates. Despite advances in molecular biology and genomics, targeted therapies have had limited impact on improving patien...
Canada is known to have a complex pathway for new drug approval and reimbursement, resulting in delayed access for patients with serious and life-threatening diseases, such as cancer. Several recent publications from key stakeholders, including patie...
The landscape of oncologic therapies has undergone large changes since the introduction of monoclonal antibody (mAb) based immunotherapies in the late 1990s and early 2000s. MAb-based therapeutics, also called biologics or large molecules, have disti...
Cardiology and oncology are two fields dedicated to the study of various types of oncological and cardiac diseases, but when they collide, a new specialty is born, i.e., cardio-oncology. Continuous research on cancer therapy has brought into the clin...
Background: Timely public reimbursement of innovative medicines remains a challenge in Canada despite expedited regulatory review pathways. This study evaluated whether an accelerated reimbursement pathway, similar to Ontario’s Funding Accelera...
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays an important role within the brain by regulating a wide variety of cognitive and emotional processes. In cancer, its role is distinct and uncertain, but it is characterized by the interaction with its recepto...
The approval of a new drug for cancer treatment by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) is based on positive, well-designed randomized phase III clinical trials (RCTs). However, not all of them are analyze...
The complex pathway for new drug reimbursement in Canada has been well documented. Drugs with promising early efficacy data may receive a Notice of Compliance with Conditions (NOC/c) from Health Canada. For oncology drugs that receive NOC/c, the path...
Controlled drug delivery systems can be used to carry several anticancer agents, including classical chemotherapeutic agents such as doxorubicin, paclitaxel or cisplatin, and are also used for the encapsulation of tyrosine kinase inhibitors and monoc...
Pancreatic cancer (PC) is one of the deadliest malignancies worldwide, since patients rarely display symptoms until an advanced and unresectable stage of the disease. Current chemotherapy options are unsatisfactory and there is an urgent need for mor...
Therapeutic advances in oncology in the 21st century have contributed to significant declines in cancer mortality. Notably, targeted therapies comprised the largest proportion of oncology drugs approved by the United States (US) Food and Drug Adminis...
Canada has one of the most complex and rigorous drug approval and public reimbursement processes and is, unfortunately, one of the countries with the longest delays in drug access. To assess the overall impact of systemic delays in access to cancer t...
Despite significant progress in the field of clinical oncology in terms of diagnostic and treatment methods, the results of anticancer therapy are still not fully satisfactory, especially due to limited response and high toxicity. This has forced the...
Cancer incidence and mortality continue to increase, while the conventional chemotherapeutic drugs confer limited efficacy and relevant toxic side effects. Novel strategies are urgently needed for more effective and safe therapeutics in oncology. How...
Background: Cancer rehabilitation represents a series of measures adopted for the recovery of psychological, emotional, social, and financial functioning in the case of cancer patients. The purpose of this study is to identify the main elements of th...
Tumors of the digestive system, when combined together, account for more new cases and deaths per year than tumors arising in any other system of the body and their incidence continues to increase. Despite major efforts aimed at discovering and valid...
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