By CHISATO MATSUMOTO/ Staff Writer
May 22, 2025 at 07:00 JST
Anti-cancer drug Opdivo marketed by Ono Pharmaceutical Co. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
Treatment costs using advanced medicines for patients with stage 4 cancer are 10 to 50 times more expensive than standard treatment using conventional anti-cancer drugs, according to a medical group’s first large-scale survey.
Expensive new drugs have increasingly become available in recent years. And for patients with stage 4 cancer, the most severe phase, such medicines have become the main treatment method.
The survey, conducted by the Japan Clinical Oncology Group (JCOG), a nationwide organization of doctors who specialize in cancer treatment, compared medical expenses using these new drugs with the costs of using standard anti-cancer drugs from 10 to 15 years ago.
About 15,000 patients who received initial treatments for 17 types of cancer from 2021 to 2022 at facilities registered with JCOG were asked about their monthly drug costs.
For all types of cancer, 59 percent of patients received treatment costing 500,000 yen ($3,476) or more per month.
For 17 percent of all patients, their monthly treatment costs were 1 million yen or more.
Since cancer treatments are all standard protocols, patients generally must pay only 10 to 30 percent of the costs after public health insurance is applied.
There is also the High-Cost Medical Expense Benefit system that sets a ceiling on monthly treatment costs depending on income.
Observers have said these advanced treatments are increasingly straining the financial conditions of the public health insurance program.
Recent groundbreaking cancer treatments include drugs that target specific molecules in cancer cells and immune checkpoint inhibitors that act on immune functions. These new pharmaceuticals are expensive due to high development costs and other factors.
An analysis of 1,880 patients with metastatic and difficult-to-treat colon cancer showed that conventional anti-cancer drugs alone cost the patients 17,000 yen to 51,000 yen per month.
Treatments that include molecular targeted drugs raised the cost to 85,000 yen to 843,000 yen per month.
Sixteen percent of patients in this category received treatment that cost 500,000 yen or more a month, according to the survey.
Until about 15 years ago, the only treatments available for metastatic colon cancer were conventional anti-cancer drugs.
Soaring treatment costs have also been observed for other types of cancer.
For gastric cancer patients, treatment with new drugs can cost up to 770,000 yen a month, more than 20 times the cost of conventional medicines.
For lung cancer patients, some drug treatments can exceed 1.3 million yen, up to 55 times the conventional cost.
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