Worldwide the costs of health care are increasing rapidly, and this is particularly true for expenditure on new anticancer drugs. It is important to assess the value of new anticancer drugs, weighing up the balance between benefits, harms and costs.
The world’s two leading medical oncology organisations, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO), have formulated objective, validated and reproducible frameworks to assess the value of anticancer drugs.1,2 These frameworks aim to improve transparency and provide independent measures of the degree of benefit a treatment offers. Both frameworks use data from individual clinical trials to assess the value of a new treatment in comparison with the standard of care used in the trial.
Important similarities and differences will be highlighted, as well as potential applications to health policy and clinical applications.