“INNOVATION without access is no use to anyone.”
This quote resonates deeply with me after spending most of my adult life in the pharmaceutical industry.
This World Cancer Day 2026, I reflect on a difficult truth: while we have made significant advances in cancer treatment over the past decade, for too many families a diagnosis still brings fear—not only of the disease itself, but of whether care is financially within reach and what that cost means for life beyond treatment.
Asia’s cancer burden and the reality of uneven access
Nearly half of the world’s cancer cases occur in Asia yet access to comprehensive cancer care remains uneven.
While high-income countries are able to provide comprehensive treatment in more than 90% of cases, access drops to below 15% in many other parts of the world, a substantial proportion of which is in Asia.
Health systems with established oncology infrastructure and stronger reimbursement pathways tend to enable more consistent use of effective therapies from essential chemotherapy and small molecule medicines to advanced biologics and biosimilars.
However, in Asia, differences in regulation, reimbursement design and awareness continue to shape how quickly and consistently these therapies reach patients, with direct consequences for survival and quality of life.
In Malaysia and Vietnam, despite ongoing investments in oncology services, high prices and gaps in reimbursement mean many patients face significant out-of-pocket costs for biologic cancer therapies, limiting timely and sustained access.
In Vietnam in particular, high out-of-pocket spending has been linked to treatment delays and financial hardship for households affected by cancer.
In more mature systems such as Taiwan, strong regulatory and clinical infrastructure has enabled broader availability of innovative oncology medicines. At the same time, sustainability considerations have driven policy innovation.
In 2024, Taiwan’s National Health Insurance Administration (NHIA) launched a pilot programme to encourage the use of biosimilars, increasing their share among reimbursed biologics from 7.38% in 2023 to 11.9%.
The NHIA has set an ambition to raise biosimilar utilisation to 70%, strengthening drug supply resilience while expanding patient access.
Generics and Biosimilars: From cost savings to sustainable cancer care
For decades, more affordable treatment through quality generic medicines—including established chemotherapy and targeted oral therapies—have formed the backbone of cancer care across the globe, enabling continuity of treatment within constrained health system budgets.
Today, biosimilars extend this same access principle to more advanced biologic cancer therapies.
Biosimilars are medicines that are highly similar to approved biologics, with no meaningful differences in safety or effectiveness, yet are offered at substantially lower prices—often 30–50% less than reference products.
By reducing cost barriers, biosimilars can enable earlier initiation of therapy, support treatment completion, and allow more patients to benefit from proven cancer medicines.
At Sandoz, the global leader in affordable medicines, we see both generics and biosimilars as more than cost-saving alternatives. They are enablers of system-wide change, freeing up healthcare resources, expanding treatment capacity, and helping health systems deliver earlier and more equitable access to cancer care.
In more mature markets such as the UK, savings from just 10 biosimilar and generic medicines were enough to fully fund initiatives like the UK Cancer Drugs Fund.
Similar impacts are seen across Europe, where aligned policy, reimbursement frameworks and clinical leadership have driven biosimilar uptake for key oncology biologics to 60–80% within two years of launch, expanding access while maintaining system sustainability.
Call to action
As we mark World Cancer Day 2026 under the theme #UnitedByUnique, Asia has an opportunity to rethink how cancer care is delivered—recognising individual patient needs while uniting stakeholders, both in private and in public, behind scalable, sustainable solutions.
Cancer should not be a disease where treatment options are dictated by wealth or location.
With a shared commitment to people-centred care and increased adoption of quality-assured biosimilars to expand access to life-saving biologics, we can help level the playing field across Asia and give more patients a fairer chance in the fight against cancer.
Boon Huey Ee is the president of Sandoz Asia Cluster, a regional business unit of the global generics and biosimilars leader, focusing on providing affordable, high-quality medicines across key Asian markets
The views expressed are solely of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT
- Focus Malaysia
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