Rebecca Robbins - The New York Times - 5 September 2026
"Revolution Medicines set a sticker price of about $480,000 a year, or $663 a tablet, for its new pancreatic cancer drug — a cost that would have once been unthinkably high.
Today, such prices are routine for cancer drugs.
One cutting-edge CAR-T therapy now goes for $600,000 for a one-time infusion. A competitor, given the same way, is listed at $550,000. A daily pill for gastrointestinal cancer has a sticker price of $520,000 a year. A twice-daily pill for leukemia? It’s $430,000 a year.
In 2024 alone, nine cancer drugs were approved and then introduced with sticker prices above $400,000 annually, according to a tally by the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, which evaluates the value of medicines.
That these prices have become commonplace would have been hard to imagine two decades ago, when even the prospect of a $100,000-a-year cancer drug evoked fierce criticism.
But since then, cancer drug prices have steadily increased, with few constraints beyond what a company thinks the market will bear. The expense is borne by government programs like Medicare, employers, patients and Americans who pay taxes and health insurance premiums.
A spokesperson for Revolution Medicines, Brian Crawford, said the price of its new drug, Rasonque, “reflects its differentiation and the meaningful benefit it provides for patients.”
As is typical with other cancer drugs, the vast majority of the cost of Rasonque is expected to be covered through insurance, with varying out-of-pocket costs for patients. Crawford said uninsured and underinsured patients who met certain financial and medical criteria would receive the drug for free. The drug, also known as daraxonrasib, is taken as two pills a day.
In the medical world, much of the anger over cancer drug prices has been directed at pricey medicines that either failed or did not undergo clinical trials assessing whether they extend lives. Those drugs won approval because they could shrink tumors or delay their growth.
Revolution Medicines’ drug is not a cure, but it has shown that it can prolong life expectancy. In a key clinical trial, patients with advanced pancreatic cancer who got the pill lived for a median of 13.2 months, compared with 6.7 months for those who got chemotherapy.
Those results have electrified pancreatic cancer specialists and patients because they occurred in people who had no good treatment options and little time left to live.
In that context, it’s hard to say whether Revolution Medicines’ price is fair, said Stacie Dusetzina, a health policy professor at Vanderbilt University who studies drug pricing. “This drug does have substantial clinical benefits over existing treatment, which isn’t always the case for high-priced cancer drugs,” she said.
Cancer patients often stay on a drug for only a matter of months, stopping because it has become too toxic or their cancer has progressed. For example, in the clinical trial that won approval for Rasonque, patients were on the drug for a median of six months. But even over several months, the costs can pile up, and some patients who respond well can stay on a cancer drug for years.
Over the years, the public and lawmakers have expressed outrage at the high costs of insulin and drugs for HIV, hepatitis C and, most recently, obesity. One-time therapies for rare genetic diseases now routinely carry price tags of a few million dollars.
But cancer holds a unique place in the system, because care and drugs are so expensive and affect so many people.
For the past five years, employers have said cancer is the top disease category driving their medical expenses, according to a survey published in late August by the Business Group on Health, which represents large employers that provide health insurance to their workers.
Compounding the rising costs is that in some cancers, like multiple myeloma, patients are now routinely given three or four therapies at once.
The high prices aren’t limited to drugs that treat small numbers of patients. Oncology’s biggest blockbuster is Keytruda, which has a sticker price of $213,000 a year. It is given as an infusion or an injection every few weeks and has been used to treat several million patients.
For many older drugs, generic competition and government negotiations have sharply driven down costs. But there are hardly any limits on manufacturers’ ability to set high prices for newly approved medications.
“We allow pharmaceutical companies to charge whatever they want, and without any clear rationale, other than how much they think they can get,” said Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine at Harvard University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital who studies drug pricing.
A drug’s sticker price is not the real price paid by patients or their insurers — it’s just the starting point for negotiations that lower the final price for the employer or the government. But while that dynamic sharply reduces the true prices of diabetes and autoimmune drugs, the final price for cancer drugs is typically only slightly lower than the sticker price.
Cancer drugmakers and their defenders say the prices reflect a boom in innovation that has transformed deadly diseases into chronic ones and even produced cures."
