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Food for Thought: Future Reimbursement of Novel Cancer Drugs in Germany
Germany’s new law regulating the reimbursement of drugs, the so-called Arzneimittelmarktneuordnungsgesetz – AMNOG, requires companies planning to introduce a novel drug to the German market to provide a value dossier, if they want reimbursement of the full price for the first year of marketing (See the akampioneer, “Germany’s New Reimbursement Law“). This value dossier not only needs to demonstrate efficacy and safety, but also has to provide evidence that the drug is more advantageous to existing treatments in terms of patient-relevant endpoints such as morbidity, mortality and quality of life.
This is difficult to prove as many novel cancer drugs are approved on the basis of surrogate endpoints such as slowing or stopping cancer growth (objective response rate ORR, time to tumor progression TTP, time to treatment failure TTF or progression-free survival PFS).
Late last month, Germany‘s Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) has published details on how it is going to evaluate the patient benefit in these cases. IQWiG usually is evaluating drugs on behalf of the so-called Gemeinsamer Bundesausschuss G-BA (Federal Committee), a decision body within Germany´s statutory healthcare system.
In cancer, IQWiG plans to primarily address „the question as to whether a therapy can prolong the life of affected patients. In addition, a new therapy should alleviate symptoms, prevent complications, and improve quality of life.“ If surrogate endpoints have been used for approval, IQWiG will only accept them as evidence for patient benefit, if the validity of these endpoints for demonstrating patient benefit can be proven by correlation-based approaches based on randomized controlled trials.
In a 160 page „rapid report“ (available in German only) IQWiG details its approach to search available literature for studies on the correlation between surrogate and patient-relevant endpoints. In addition, it describes how it is performing a meta-analysis of these studies for assessing the strength of the correlation (three levels) and the reliability of the validation studies (four levels) to reach an overall conclusion about the validity of the surrogate endpoint for a decision whether the new drug is providing patient benefit.
While the institute so far has only differentiated between „proof“ of surrogate endpoint validity and „indication“ of validity (meaning medium reliability), it proposes to introduce a third category called „hint“ for the fulfillment of certain minimal requirements for the available studies. This category will be applied in cases where the validity of a surrogate endpoint is unclear – a situation IQWiG expects to be quite common. In these cases, IQWiG states, „it can also be taken into account how strong the effect of a treatment turns out to be“. IQWiG would then seek to find a threshold value for the surrogate marker and evaluate whether the new treatment exceeds this value, e.g. whether it decelerates tumor growth for longer than a specified period of time.
Last not least, IQWiG appeals to drug makers and study groups to make accessible their analyses on the validity of surrogate endpoints and the specification of threshold values, e.g. in special registries.
A short English summary of IQWiG‘s basic assumptions on how to recognize at an early stage whether a new cancer therapy prolongs life can be found here. IQWiGs proposals for the early benefit assessment of cancer drugs can be read, also in English, here.