This is too often the case: With the promise of a new cure comes the promise of increased costs.

A number of cancer researchers believe that the best way to treat the ubiquitous disease will increasingly involve using a combination of different drugs.

For instance, Lake Bluff, Ill.-based drug maker AbbVie Inc. hopes that combining two of its drugs, Imbruvica and Venclexta, will yield a more effective treatment of a certain strain of leukemia. The problem? Each drug costs more than $100,000 for one year of treatment.

Another recent example comes out of a conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago, where a team of researchers reported that a three-drug cocktail appeared to be more effective in treating multiple myeloma than the conventional two-drug combination. But adding that third drug, Darzalex, to treat multiple myeloma would bring the annual treatment cost to $180,000, up from roughly $45,000.

In its clinical study of the new drug combination on 500 patients, New Brunswick, N.J.-based pharmaceutical and consumer goods giant Johnson & Johnson found that adding Darzalex reduced mortality by 61 percent over a period of seven and a half months.

While pharmaceutical companies often offer discounts on sky-high-priced drugs to insurers and providers, Johnson & Johnson is mum on what types of deals, if any, it could offer. The medicine has yet to pass regulatory approval in the United States.

In many instances, the benefits of a costly combination will not be as clear as Darzalex appears to be.

“We have to think about if the benefit from combination therapies is worth the cost,” Daniel Goldstein, a medical oncologist at Rabin Medical Center in Israel, told the Wall Street Journal.

A.G. Roche, the maker of a number of powerful cancer drugs, told The Wall Street Journal it is adapting its prices to the new landscape in some ways. It has priced a new breast cancer medication, Perjeta, lower than usual because it is intended to be used in combination with another one of its drugs, Herceptin.

If costly combinations become mainstream, one can expect there will be an even stronger push to reform the wasteful way that cancer drugs are stored and distributed. A recent study showed that billions of dollars of cancer medication is thrown away each year because the vials in which they are distributed contain far more medication than is necessary.

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New cancer drug combinations likely to bring increased costs

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