Coverage for a potentially lifesaving drug has been denied to a Vancouver man with a stage four cancer, even though the drug is approved by Health Canada, and was prescribed by his oncologist.
“His oncologist was so excited when she told us about it,” said Samia Perez, the wife of 43-year-old cancer patient Manuel Perez. “She told us the drug has shown good results in pediatric patients, an 80 per cent reduction in tumours and a 20 per cent cure rate. No one had ever used that word ‘cure’ with us before.”Because the drug, Entrectinib, costs $10,200 a month, their oncologist at B.C. Cancer immediately applied for coverage under the agency’s Compassionate Access program.
Perez, a web developer, was at the gym in 2018 when he felt a lump in his lower abdomen. Doctors at a local walk-in clinic guessed it was a hernia, and didn’t order an ultrasound. But Samia’s Perez had a 12 cm mass growing on the outside of his colon, a stage 3 soft-tissue Desmoplastic small round cell sarcoma, an aggressive form of cancer rarely found in adults.
“It meant everything to feel like we had a chance as a family, to think this could all be behind, us. Manuel threw out all his chemo clothes . This was a new beginning,” said Samia.Article content
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