Impact of COVID-19 on Oncology Drug Shortages

Joshua K. Sabari, MD, medical director of Kimmel Pavilion 12 at NYU Langone Health’s Perlmutter Cancer Center and assistant professor of medicine at NYU, explains how the shortage of drugs in the oncology space, including carboplatin and cisplatin, began.

According to Sabari, drug shortages are not new. However, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as supply chain issues, shortages have been at an increase in recent years.

Most recently, national supplies of cisplatin and carboplatin, drugs vital in the treatment of lung, breast, ovarian, testicular, bladder, and head-neck cancers, have been depleted.

Transcription:

0:08 | Drug shortages are not new. They've been around for a long time and we have seen [it] in lots of different fields, ICU care, infectious disease, and clearly in oncology, a very niche space. We've seen significant drug shortages for the past 5 or 10 years. But ever since COVID and supply chain issues, we've definitely seen an increase. There's about a 20% or 30% increase in current shortages. Really, it's 1 pharmaceutical company that produced carboplatin that had quality control issues, and the FDA fortunately shut them down, and that led to a major shortage.

0:48 | It shows you the weak points in generic therapeutic medications. A lot of medicines that are on patent and are being produced by pharmaceutical companies, those medicines do not go on shortage, and we don't have sort of limited supply there. But it's really these medicines that are generic, that are off patent, that have very low margins. These are medicines that oftentimes are at risk of going into shortage, and that's what we've seen with carboplatin and cisplatin of late. But again, this is not a new issue. I think the closure, or the suspension of carboplatin from Intas, has sort of highlighted this as an issue.