September 26, 2003

BIRMINGHAM, AL — A cancer doctor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) played a key role in helping patients across the country gain access to a potentially curative treatment for life-threatening forms of melanoma and kidney cancer. Some hospitals had ceased to offer the drug, high-dose interleukin-2 (IL-2), because they were losing at least $10,000 per month of therapy for each patient receiving the therapy, for up to 12 months.

Dr. Robert M. Conry of the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center, along with cancer specialists from eight other centers, provided essential cost-effectiveness information to the federal agency that determines reimbursement that hospitals get for Medicare patients who receive this treatment. That data led the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to dramatically increase Medicare reimbursement as of October 1.

Medical centers as large as Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston had closed down high-dose IL-2 programs due to low reimbursement for the costly hospitalization and specially trained personnel required to administer the treatment.

“Although high-dose IL-2 is the most effective therapy for metastatic melanoma and kidney cancer, most hospitals and physicians don’t offer it or quit offering it because of the reimbursement issue and the lack of expertise required to administer the drug and monitor patients for side effects during their five-day in-hospital stay each month of treatment,” Conry said.

“On behalf of a small patient population, UAB’s Comprehensive Cancer Center is committed to delivering the best possible therapy even if in circumstances where our costs are not fully reimbursed. Fortunately, we’ve been able to work with Medicare decision-makers to completely cover the costs of this important cancer therapy at our hospital and across the nation,” he said.

“Hopefully,” he said, “private insurance companies will follow Medicare’s lead and increase their payments as well. If this happens, I expect the treatment to become even more widely available to patients in desperate need.”

Richard Wirth, 64, of Gulf Breeze, Florida, travels to UAB every month for the treatment, administered as part of a clinical trial. “Having IL-2 in my treatment has made significant improvement to my melanoma situation. With it, I feel we can whip this cancer.”

Wirth, a production supervisor for a linen service, has seen his cancer shrink by more than 50 percent under the clinical trial protocol, which calls for him to receive high-dose IL-2 either alone or in combination with an experimental vaccine.

“I found Dr. Conry through an Internet search and started in the clinical study in May. There have been side effects but since I was in the hospital, the doctors and nurses were able to get on top of them every time,” he said.

Wirth is due in Birmingham for his next treatment in mid-October.