Desperate terminally ill cancer patients in China making their own drugs
Those who cannot wait for years for government approval of effective drugs, or the staggering cost, are finding raw materials and instructions online
Faced with an absence of effective foreign drugs or prohibitively high prices, some terminal cancer patients on the mainland are making drugs on their own.
Such patients gather online to trade active pharmaceutical ingredients (API), the basic ingredients of pharmaceuticals which, following guidelines from fellow patients, they mix in the hope of extending their lives, according to a report in the Southern Weekend on Thursday.
The told the newspaper they could not afford to wait for drugs to be approved by the national drug regulator for use in China or could not afford the high prices of approved drugs, so DIY drugs, using formulas to replicate effective drugs approved in other markets, were their last hope.
One third of my patients are taking such medications
The median survival time of terminal lung cancer patients is 14 months, but it takes between three to five years for foreign drugs go be approved by the China Food and Drug Administration, the report said.
“Many patients have become doctors and chemists. They find ways to buy API to make drugs. One third of my patients are taking such medications,” Wu Yilong, vice-president of Guangdong People’s Hospital and a lung cancer expert, told the newspaper.
Ling Hao, whose 61-year-old mother’s lung cancer had spread to the brain, decided to treat her with self-made drugs after trying all available drugs domestic drugs.
The patients referred to such drugs in the code names according to their API before they are officially approved. Ling bought AZD9291, standing for Osimertinib, a drug made by AstraZeneca to treat non-small cell lung cancer that was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration last year.