OBJECTIVES: New anticancer drugs have become synonymous with dramatically high costs, leading to an eminent apprehension of healthcare stakeholders. Whether the survival benefit is in proportion to the economic expenditure is ambiguous. Thus, our study aimed to assess the correlation between the price and value of innovative drugs in specific tumors, considering negotiation policy implementation or not.

METHODS: We identified new drugs that were negotiated in National Reimbursement Drug List (NRDL) from 2016 to 2022 for lung cancer (LC) and breast cancer (BC). Therapeutic value was combined the improvement percentage of OS and PFS (ΔOS%, ΔPFS%) with the quantified gain of the American Society of Clinical Oncology Value Framework (ASCO-VF) and the European Society for Medical Oncology Magnitude of Clinical Benefit Scale (ESMO-MCBS). We calculated monthly drug costs and employed Spearman’s correlation coefficient for analysis. The consistency test was executed by Cohen’s kappa statistics.

RESULTS: Up to 2022, a total of 26 innovative price-negotiated drugs were collected. The median monthly costs were US$3865.33 out of NRDL and US$1376.28 within NRDL. The ΔOS% and ΔPFS% of these drugs were 36.10% (IQR 18.78%-48.22%) and 84.22% (IQR 48.49%-100.79%), respectively. The median ASCO-VF score was 31.65, as well as 9 drugs, scored the meaningful benefit of ESMO-MCBS. No association was found between clinical benefits with their costs before NRDL, whereas the value of drugs measured by two frameworks positively correlated with therapeutic expenditure after NRDL admissions. An agreement between the two frameworks was stable.

CONCLUSIONS: The negotiation policy has diminished medication costs and seemed to exhibit a notable correlation among specific cancers. Comprehensive value assessments need to be performed in future to support our findings and promote the affordability and availability of effective anticancer drugs.