Budgeting novel anti-cancer drugs: with which resources?

Recently developed drugs are ten to one hundred fold costlier than the chemotherapies of the past while the number of eligible patients and the average duration of treatments are ever increasing. The combined effort of these trends makes budgeting a daunting task in particular for hospitals with budgetary allocation. Balancing budgets became difficult with the arrival of taxanes, but innovative therapies based an biotechnological advances will further increase the financial slide. Hospital running costs can not be infinitely reduced. Therefore, new rules that govern the financing of innovative therapies become mandatory and budgetary allocations based on DRG evaluations will no longer be feasible.