All right. Okay, that's better. Okay, let us get started. This is lecture three.

Lecture three in this series on how to read and interpret clinical studies, and it is on the cost of cancer

drugs and some cancer drug policy basics. I'm Vinay Prasad again. I'm a hemank doctor here at SFGH and I'm an associate professor in the Department of Epi

and Biostats.

I'm joined by some colleagues who are on the Zoom and maybe they'll say something too.

All right, everything you see or hear today you can learn more about. If you're interested in cancer drug policy, this is the book for you, Malignant.

There are some pertinent videos on the YouTube channel about cancer drug policy.

They're under a playlist, I think, called Lectures.

Plenary Session Podcast, it's returning to its roots.

It's going to be all cancer drug policy.

And I'm active on Twitter. All right. I'll skip that. Okay, skip that. Okay, okay, okay, here we go. The first thing to know.

The cost of cancer drugs, this is by per month of a cancer drug. So depending on the year it was

launched, and it is going up and up and up.

So the figure on the left shows that somebody has to mute themselves. The figure on the left

shows that the cost of cancer drugs is rising five times faster than other classes of

medications. So cancer drug price per month of treatment is going

up and up. On the right, you see nicely shown, if a drug was approved between 1975 and

1979, it was $129 per month. It was approved between 1990 and 94. It was $1,000 a month. 95 to 99,

it was $1,700 a month. But in recent years, it has gone up and up and up.

This is already maybe five, six years out of date. It says about $10,000 a month. We're nearing

$20,000 a month. That's the ballpark we're at now. All of these figures are inflation

adjusted, so they represent the same relative purchasing power today versus many years ago.

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