BACKGROUND: In today’s competitive oncology landscape, pharmaceutical manufacturers must plan for European commercialization activities by evaluating the likelihood of reimbursement, designing evidence generation programs, and consider pricing at an early stage in development. Understanding key health-economic outcome drivers is essential to inform this process and cost-effectiveness modeling is often required to generate these insights. Alternatives to an expensive, bespoke cost-effectiveness model (CEM) are needed to reduce costs at this early stage in the product lifecycle.

OBJECTIVE: Develop a flexible, simple, and transparent CEM for oncology to be used in early-stage commercialization planning across a variety of indications, requiring low levels of data input and resource investment.

METHODS: A partitioned-survival CEM was built in Microsoft Excel with the states ‘progression-free survival’, ‘progressed disease’ and ‘death’. Model outcomes include life-years gained, quality-adjusted life-years gained and total costs. Users may select time horizons up to 20 years. Model inputs include structural settings (currency, time horizon, discount rate), costs (drug acquisition, administration, health care resource use, adverse events) and utility (health states, adverse events). There are several options for including efficacy data in the model: 1) Enter Kaplan-Meier data for progression-free and overall survival for both intervention and comparator, automatically fitted with exponential and Weibull parametric curves to extrapolate survival beyond trial duration. 2) Enter Kaplan-Meier data for standard of care and a hazard ratio for the novel intervention. 3) Enter fitted parametric curves. Validation in multiple indications is currently ongoing and the base version is now open for public comment to ensure continuous improvement.

CONCLUSION: The free, generic, cost-effectiveness model is adaptable to various indications and interventions. It is fit for purpose in providing early cost-effectiveness analysis of oncology products and for validation of existing assessments. A base version of the model is now available to interested parties at no cost.