How are funding decisions made for Medicare and Medicaid? What drugs are to be funded? These questions have recently come to our attention as many of us have attempted to have Medicare fund our use of Provenge. The administration of Medicare is actually broken into 15 different regions, or MACs (Medicare Administrative Contractors). Each MAC [...]
We have talked about it many times in past posts, the potential that many believe combination therapy can hold for better treatments for all cancers, including advanced prostate cancer. Combination therapy has made AIDS treatment as successful as it has become and it holds a similar promise for cancer treatment. An example of this potential [...]
The National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN), a private organization which develops what has become the standard of care guidelines for clinical practice in oncology, has modified their guidelines to included sipuleucel-T (Provenge) as a part of its prostate cancer management guidelines. The guidelines specify Provenge as a category 1 treatment which is appropriate as salvage [...]
There remain for many people questions about Provenge. The most common question I hear is about the financial cost of the treatment for what has been described as “only 4 months of life extension for $93,000, is it worth it?” Well, the answer is a clear yes! […]
Bavarian Nordic (B/N) is in the process of testing what might be the next prostate cancer vaccine to become available. They have successfully completed a phase II trial of 125 men with metastatic prostate cancer. The good news, the survival advantage experienced by the trial’s subjects had a statistically significantly longer median overall survival of [...]