Advances in diagnosis and care have yielded significant improvements in childhood cancer survival rates in Europe, but the long-term side-effect burden in young people driven by the unlicensed use of adult cancer medicines often means the price of survival is high, scientists say.
Prescribing unlicensed drugs or the ‘off-label’ use of adult medicines for childhood cancer is largely the norm since the incidence of disease compared to adults is rare, which has disincentivised the biopharmaceutical industry from investing in paediatric research.
Somehow, it has been widely accepted that it is standard for children with cancer to be treated with off-label adult drugs, says Prof. Ruth Ladenstein, project coordinator of the European Reference Network on Paediatric Cancer and a member of the EU’s cancer mission board (see box below for more on the mission).