Breast cancer patients to get help with high pill costs

The Hong Kong Breast Cancer Foundation has launched a financial assistance program to subsidize treatment for 25 patients from the "sandwich class."

Each successful applicant will be offered a maximum one-year subsidy of HK$120,000 for a medication called nerlynx, also known as neratinib.

The subsidy was created under the "Nerlynx Breast Cancer Patient Assistance Program'' for sandwich-class patients who receive treatment in local private hospitals or clinics.

It is restricted to patients with an average monthly income of HK$50,000 or less in the past four months.

Those who are married must not have an average joint income exceeding HK$100,000.

The launch comes after the foundation found there were "numerous" subvention programs offered by the Hospital Authority and pharmaceutical companies but only limited options for sandwich-class patients.

Nerlynx is an oral tablet that is considered a small molecule targeted therapy for HER2-positive and HR-positive early breast cancer patients as an extended adjuvant treatment. HER2-positive breast cancer tends to be more aggressive than other types of breast cancer.

Yau Chun-chung, a management committee member of the foundation, said this kind of cancer has a faster growth rate, and the chances of recurrence are high. He added that 31 percent of HER2-positive breast cancer patients still experience a recurrence within 10 years, even after receiving HER2-targeted therapy called trastuzumab.

In the case of HR-positive breast cancer, it was found that it can recur more than five years after recovery.

Yau said nerlynx can reduce the five-year relative risk of recurrence by 42 percent and the eight-year relative risk of death by 51 percent in early-stage HER2-positive breast cancer patients.

The medication is normally recommended to "high-risk patients," such as those with stage-three breast cancer.

Applications began yesterday and will run until June 30 on a first-come, first-served basis.

Other than being a member of the sandwich class, applicants must be permanent residents who were signed off by registered surgeons or oncologists from local private hospitals or clinics to undergo the nerlynx treatment.

Yau said each bottle of the tablets can cost around HK$40,000. The program will provide a 25 percent subsidy for each bottle, with a maximum subsidy of HK$10,000 per bottle.

Breast cancer is the number one form of cancer afflicting females in Hong Kong, with 4,618 new cases diagnosed in 2018.

The number of breast cancer incidences increased nearly four times in the past 25 years, and the lifetime breast cancer risk for females is one in 14.