Red tape hampering Sirtex at home

The US is embracing Sirtex Medical's novel anti-cancer technology more quickly than Australia where government evaluation of the technology appears to have stalled.

Two more major US anti-cancer centres last week began using Sirtex' micro-sphere technology for treating liver cancer, the Sydney-based company announced. The addition of Wake Forrest University Baptist Hospital and the University of Maryland Greenbaum Cancer Centre brings to four the number of high profile US centres who have adopted the technology since its March approval for use in the US.

Sirtex CEO Dr Colin Sutton is pleased with US progress but frustrated by government-created impediments to the echnology in its domestic market.

The technology is yet to receive a seal of approval from the Health Department's Medical Services Advisory Committee (MSAC), more than two years after being submitted.

MSAC's recommendations are needed before any new medical service can be added to Medicare. As a result, unlike their US counterparts, Australian centres cannot yet claim insurance reimbursements from the government for the cost of providing Sirtex SIR-Sphere treatments to their patients.

The company says the evaluation application has disappeared into the bureaucracy. "For the first 18 months, [the committee] kept asking for more information," said Sutton.

"Since then we've heard nothing. It has just gone missing in action." Until MSAC makes its recommendation, "many hospitals are constrained in their ability to adopt the therapy," he said.

Just in the last month, one hospital that had been using the technology to treat two patients ended the sessions on financial grounds.

"The physicians were keen but the administrators stepped in and put a cap on it saying they couldn't afford to do any more [because of inability to reclaim costs from government]."

The long delays "make it really tough for an Australian company trying to establish itself," he says. The Department of Health was contacted for comment but did not reply before press time.

SIR-Spheres are biocompatible microspheres containing yttrium-90 which emit tumour-destroying radiation that leaves normal liver tissues largely unaffected. Their shape allows them to travel in the bloodstream and lodge in the liver's small blood vessels. The devices have gone through appropriate clinical trials and have been used to treat hundreds of patients in Australia, Asia and now the US. Sirtex has two more micro-sphere related products in its pipeline and retains $10 million from its $15 million IPO in September 2000.