On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration may decide to withdraw approval for the drug Avastin for the treatment of late-stage breast cancer. The move would affect tens of thousands of families across the country — including mine.
In June 2006, my mom was diagnosed with Stage II breast cancer. She underwent a double mastectomy, reconstruction and six months of chemo. Once full of energy, she became perpetually weak and often couldn’t muster the strength to even get out of bed.
Then just 44, she had “triple negative breast cancer,” a rare and particularly lethal form of the disease. Most traditional treatments tend to do little to fend it off. A year after the initial diagnosis, the doctor told our family that the cancer had gone metastatic, or Stage IV, and had spread to her right lung.
Such news is typically a death sentence. Our family was devastated.
But the doctor encouraged us to try out a new, experimental drug called Avastin that the FDA had just approved for cancer treatment. The drug attacks cancer by choking off the blood supply to tumors, and was already in use in the treatment of kidney, colon, lung and brain cancers.
We got a miracle. After four months of Avastin treatment in combination with chemo, the cancer effectively vanished — the doctors literally couldn’t find any trace of the disease in her body.
In January 2009, my mom actually got to go off traditional chemotherapy and exclusively use Avastin, as a targeted treatment. Nearly two years later, she’s still cancer-free.
So why in the world would the FDA revoke Avastin’s approval for treating breast cancer?
This summer, an internal agency panel of 13 experts — only two of them breast-cancer oncologists — determined that Avastin didn’t have “sufficiently large” benefits for breast cancer, and advised the general body to rescind the drug’s approval for treating the disease.
Yet many studies have found that Avastin can offer a better quality of life and vitality to breast-cancer patients. Fine: Most woman aren’t “super responders” to Avastin like my mom. But for many, Avastin can give months, sometimes even years, of extra life and dramatically improve the quality of the time they have left.
For instance, one clinical trial found that about half of patients receiving Avastin saw their tumors shrink. Another study reports that patients on the drug in combination with chemo had twice as many “progression-free” days or months as those without it.
We’re talking about Stage IV cancer; the FDA should let patients and doctors decide if a medicine’s benefits are worth the risks.
If the FDA does follow through on the panel’s recommendation, there’s a good chance public insurance programs like Medicare will stop covering the drug. Private insurers will likely follow.
That means most patients will likely be left to pick up the whole tab for the drug out of pocket. Given that an Avastin regimen can cost $88,000 a year, very few families can afford to do that. Mine certainly can’t.
By denying approval for this drug, the FDA is basically telling my mother and my family that her life just isn’t worth the price. They’re robbing her of a chance to celebrate her 30th wedding anniversary with my dad, or to see my little sister who is in kindergarten graduate from high school.
Thousands of women have had success with Avastin and may now lose access to their medicine — as would the countless women who may need it in the future.
Avastin has given my mom priceless time — time to spend with me, my siblings, my father and all her other family and friends. No woman should ever be denied that opportunity by our government.
Josh Turnage is a sophomore at Mississippi State University. His mother’s petition to stop the FDA from revoking Avastin’s approval is available at http://bit.ly/dv.