[Gefitinib therapy in advanced non-small cell lung cancer in patients with EGFR mutations: cost-effectiveness...

Therapy for advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is very complex clinical problem. The optimal choice of therapy demands not only the analysis of data on clinical effectiveness, but also an assessment of cost-effectiveness of the applied drugs. The current options for first- or second/third-line of lung cancer treatment are tirosine kinase inhibitors (TKI)--gefitinib, erlotinib and afatinib. According to the received results TKI first-line therapy for NSCLC in patients with EGFR mutations is not only clinically effective but also is economically acceptable from a position of the Russian budgetary health care. TKI second-line therapy for NSCLC patients who fail first-line therapy also provides improvement of the quality of life and prolonged time to progression. Comparable clinical effectiveness and safety of erlotinib and gefitinib in patients with EGFR mutations allows making drug choice on the basis of regional price characteristics. Afatinib is highly effective both in the first- and in the second/third-line of therapy in patients with the most frequent mutations (a deletion in exon 19 or a point mutation L858R in exon 21) but first-line therapy demands an increase of financial expenses caused by substantial increase of time to progression and duration of therapy. Thus TKI therapy of both the first-, and second/third-line of patients with NSCLC with EGFR mutations is characterized by acceptable cost-effectiveness.