Non-pharmaceutical technologies in cancer care: for profit or for patients?

Non pharmaceutical technologies (NPT) in cancer are a growing and significant burden on health system costs. This domain of technology in cancer covers a huge range of non-pharmaceutical areas from artificial intelligence, mHealth technologies, diagnostic testing platforms, imaging, radiotherapy and surgery, among others. These rapid advances are heavily driven by commercial incentives. However, for many NPT within cancer care systems we are rapidly hitting the “break-even point” when additional costs of providing new technologies with small benefit causes more harm than good by diverting resources and efforts from ensuring broad access to the interventions which are known to have large benefits.