PBS brings hope to cancer patients

Late-stage breast cancer patients, many of them young women, will have access to a life-extending medication when it is added to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme on Sunday.

‘Now I have hope’: Samantha Courtney with her father Bob in Melbourne. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Ian Currie

Late-stage breast cancer patients, many of them young women, will have access to a life-extending medication when it is added to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme on Sunday.

The drug Trodelvy will be added to the scheme on May 1, giving up to 800 Australians with rare and aggressive triple-­negative breast cancer precious time with loved ones and saving them up to $80,000 a treatment.

For breast cancer patients like Samantha Courtney, who has endured everything medicine could throw at her, it gives real hope where there wasn’t much left. “My tumours just seem to outsmart the chemo,” she said.

Ms Courtney has stage-four metastatic breast cancer – the third, and worst, diagnosis she has had – since 2011: 14 tumours are dotted across her breasts, sternum, chest wall and lymph nodes.

In September 2021, doctors told her she had 18 months to live.

“It was just awful; you can’t put into words what it’s like,” she said. “My family went through all the stages … they got so angry and upset it was happening.”

In another cruel twist, she was knocked back from getting “compassionate” subsidised access to Trodelvy after her third diagnosis. Her family considered launching a fundraiser but it would cover only one three-month treatment.

She said she could barely describe the relief she felt when Josh Frydenberg announced on budget night that Trodelvy would be added to the PBS in May.

“There were tears,” she said. “I was still crying the next morning. I was just so super excited.”

The addition means breast cancer patients will pay only $42.50 a treatment, or $6.80 for concession card holders.

It comes after 18 months of campaigning by Breast Cancer Network Australia to put ­metastatic breast cancer on the radar and give patients “one last roll of the dice”.

BCNA head of policy and advocacy Vicki Durston said the news was a “significant milestone” in putting the rare form of breast cancer on the public radar.

“Triple-negative breast cancer is an aggressive form; there’s limited options for what treatment these patients can receive, and they have very poor clinical outcomes,” Ms Durston said.

Trodelvy had shown reductions in tumours in 30 per cent of women taking it, giving them up to 12 extra months to live.

Ms Courtney is planning to go well beyond those 12 months. “I’m going for 10, 15 years,” she said. ”Now I have hope. I’m going the whole way.”