The cost of new, highly targeted cancer therapies is becoming a serious political issue in the US, as it has been in Europe for many years. Europeans feel that drug prices are too high, which explains why trying to use a combination of such drugs, which is increasingly recommended as the best approach from a clinical standpoint, is often both politically and economically untenable.

That’s the problem my two guests today are trying to solve. Nathan Sigworth and Richard Bergström founded the innovative startup PharmaCCX, an independent, third-party technology platform focused on improving patient outcomes by helping both sides of the negotiation reach access agreements more efficiently. Their goal is ambitious: to improve overall deal management by reshaping the way pricing and access agreements in the biopharma sector are made and sustained, so that patients can get the complex therapies - including combination oncology - they need to survive.

In this podcast, we discuss how PharmaCCX was formed, bringing together the unique skills of Nathan, who approaches the drug pricing problem by leveraging proven financial technologies used by Wall Street, and Richard, former Director General of EFPIA with years of regulatory policy experience in the pharma sector.

We also highlight the current market access challenges for effective cancer therapies and what it takes to find a consensus on drug pricing. As oncology treatments are becoming more targeted, their prices goes up due to the ever smaller pool of patients they treat. This becomes particularly challenging when clinical advice is to use several such therapies in combination, yet governments feel the price of a single one of them is already unacceptably high.

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