Each year, The Max Foundation channels millions of doses of cancer medicines to thousands of patients around the globe, some of whom have accessed treatment through our programs for more than a decade. With such a large, enduring, and diverse patient population, it’s important that we play our part in contributing to the body of knowledge regarding drug side effects.
Knowing whether a particular drug will cause a severe reaction in someone with heart disease, for instance, is critical information when making treatment decisions. And cancer treatment often involves a series of difficult decisions. No one can guarantee that your specific cancer will respond to a specific therapy. Nor can anyone guarantee that the list of scary side effects won’t become your new normal.
That’s why reporting these side effects is so important. And that’s why we’ve developed systems to ensure adverse event reports are shared promptly with local health authorities through prescribers, and with drug manufacturers alike.
In addition to benefitting the medical and patient communities at large, our reports also fill an important gap in countries where national systems for collecting them are less developed. We can support prescribers in these countries by guaranteeing reports make their way into global repositories of information regarding the safety of cancer drugs.
You can learn more about the systems we’ve pioneered, from committing staff resources to building a web-based reporting form, in our publication in the journal Globalization and Health, “A pharmacovigilance system for treatment access and medical donation programs: The Max Foundation experience”.
All of us who work in the field of medical donations have the potential to contribute directly to patient safety. If you’re interested in learning more about our efforts, or learning how your organization can do more with reporting, I hope you’ll connect with us.
The Max Foundation is a leading global health nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating health equity. For 28 years, Max has pioneered practical, scalable, high-quality solutions to bring life-extending treatments and patient-centered health care to more than 100,000 people living with cancer and critical illness in low- and middle-income countries. Max believes in a world where all people can access high-impact medicines, where geography is not destiny, and where everyone can strive for health with dignity and with hope.
For World Cancer Day, GlobalWA interviewed Max CEO Pat Garcia-Gonzalez to hear about the many lessons she has learned in this work, and how both cancer treatment and patients’ access to treatment globally has changed.
In 2011, Carmen developed a fever that lasted for weeks and began losing weight rapidly. After multiple doctors, tests, and misdiagnoses, she finally discovered she had chronic myeloid leukemia. Carmen feared her life was over. She even went so far as to sew her own funeral dress.
Eventually, Carmen learned that her cancer could be managed through oral treatment, but the costs were prohibitive. Luckily her physician was a Max Foundation partner. She was able to enroll in our access program for imatinib at no cost, and all seemed well for a few years—until, that is, she stopped responding to her initial treatment.
Last week ASCO launched the inaugural issue of the Journal of Global Oncology. This new open access, online journal focuses exclusively on cancer research, treatment, and the delivery of care in middle and low resource countries.
Among the first seven articles, published on September 23rd, are original research, commentaries, and review articles, including a special article looking at the Glivec International Patient Assistance Program (GIPAP), authored by our CEO Pat Garcia-Gonzalez, MS, and others.
