Linking the Price of Cancer Drug Treatments to Their Clinical Value.

Background And Objective: Appropriate pricing of medications is one of the ultimate goals for decision makers, but reliable data on the risk/benefit ratio are often lacking when a Marketing Authorization Application is submitted. Here we propose a method to consistently evaluate price adequacy, which we applied to six anticancer medications approved in Italy in recent years.

Methods: We obtained ratios of cost per survival per day (cost/survival/day) by dividing the total costs of evaluated medications for the median survival gain in days.

Intravitreal triamcinolone acetonide in the treatment of ophthalmic inflammatory diseases with macular edema: a meta-analysis study.

Purpose: To perform a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that compared the effects of treatment with intravitreal injections of triamcinolone acetonide (TA) with the standard of care for ocular inflammatory diseases.

Methods: Medline database was searched for causes of macular edema terms in association with intravitreal triamcinolone. The primary outcome of interest included changes in best corrected visual acuity (BCVA) and central macular thickness (CMT).

Do the current performance-based schemes in Italy really work? "Success fee": a novel measure for cost-containment of drug expenditure.

Background: Drug costs have risen rapidly in the last decade, driving third-party payers to adopt performance-based agreements that provide either a discount before payment or an ex post reimbursement on the basis of treatments' effectiveness and/or safety issues.

Objectives: This article analyses the strategies currently approved in Italy and proposes a novel model called "success fee" to improve payment-by-result schemes and to guarantee patients rapid access to novel therapies.

Methods: A review of the existing risk-sharing schemes in Italy has been performed, and data provided by the Italian National report (2012) on drug use have been analyzed to assess the impact on drug expenditure deriving from the application of "traditional" performance-based strategies since their introduction in 2006.

Reciprocal potentiation of the antitumoral activities of FK866, an inhibitor of nicotinamide phosphoribosyltransferase, and etoposide or cisplatin in neuroblastoma cells.

NAD is an essential coenzyme involved in numerous metabolic pathways. Its principal role is in redox reactions, and as such it is not heavily "consumed" by cells. Yet a number of signaling pathways that bring about its consumption have recently emerged.