News and Event

“It’s a disturbing concern,” said one of the study authors, Jagpreet Chhatwal, who is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and a senior scientist at the Institute for Technology Assessment at Massachusetts General Hospital. “And it’s happening now in CLL… Drug prices have to come down to make them more effective and more affordable.”

Dr. Jagpreet Chhatwal, assistant professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School, has studied the economics of treating hepatitis C in prisons and said that while the drugs are expensive, liver transplants and treatment for patients with hepatitis C in its later stages are also costly.

“We have millions of people who need treatment for hepatitis C and payers obviously don’t have the budget to cover this tremendous expense,” Jagpreet Chhatwal, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of health services research at the The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center said.