Abstract

Objectives

Omalizumab improves health outcomes for patients with severe asthma. The purpose of this study was to conduct a cost-utility analysis of omalizumab from a societal perspective by using the results from a randomized controlled trial in Japan, and explore the efficient use of omalizumab.

Methods

We developed a Markov model to compare omalizumab add-on therapy with standard therapy. Patients transitioned between symptom-free, day-to-day, and exacerbation states. Our model had a lifetime horizon in which 5-year omalizumab add-on therapy was followed by standard therapy. Preference-based utilities were extracted from another study. We estimated the expected value of perfect information for patients' response to omalizumab.

Results

In the base case, incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) for omalizumab add-on therapy was US $755,200 (95% credible interval [CI] $614,200–$1,298,500) per quality-adjusted life-year gained, compared with standard therapy alone. One-way sensitivity analyses indicated that the results were sensitive to asthma-related mortality, exacerbation risk, and omalizumab cost. The ICER for a responder subgroup was 22% lower than that in the base case. Individual and population expected value of perfect informations for the response were $4100 (95% CI $2500–$6000) and $28 million (95% CI $17 million–$42 million) per year, respectively.

Conclusions

With a willingness-to-pay of $45,000 per quality-adjusted life-year, omalizumab was not cost-effective in Japan. Confining omalizumab therapy to previously predicted responders, however, may be a reasonable strategy to reduce the ICER, as the cost-effectiveness was observed to improve for these patients. Further studies should be conducted to explore responder prediction methods. Decreasing the price of omalizumab would improve cost-effectiveness.