The Cancer-Drug Shortage Is Different
Last November, FDA inspectors found almost farcical conditions when they inspected an Indian manufacturing plant that supplies medical drugs to the United States. The plant, owned by Intas Pharmaceuticals, had hardly any working systems for ensuring the purity or sterility of its products. And its employees were trying to conceal evidence of these problems by shredding and hiding documents or, as one quality-control officer admitted, dousing them in acid.
Intas provided America with a lot of frontline chemotherapy drugs—half of the country’s supply in some cases—that are used to treat more than a dozen types of cancer. When the disastrous inspection led the company to halt production, other manufacturers couldn’t make up the difference. Hospitals are now reeling: In a recent survey, 93 percent of U.S. cancer centers said they were experiencing a shortage of the drug carboplatin, while 70 percent were low on another, cisplatin.
in cancer treatment can increase a patient’s odds of death, and substitute medications may be less effective or more toxic, if they exist at all. Chemo drugs often run dry—“I can’t think of a year in the past 10 or 12 where we didn’t face some kind of shortage,” Yoram Unguru, a pediatric oncologist at the Herman are currently scarce, jeopardizing the care of hundreds of thousands of Americans. “I’ve been doing this forever, and this is absolute lunacy,” Patrick Timmins III, a gynecologic oncologist at Women’s Cancer Care Associates, told me.
