Impact of Oncology Drug Review Times on Public Funding Recommendations
, Chelsea Wong 2, Eddy Taguedong 3, Saurav Verma 4, Md Mahsin 5, Safiya Karim 1, Richard Lee-Ying 1 and Doreen A. Ezeife 1
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This paper investigates the factors that impact antitumor drug review time and ultimately public funding recommendations in Canada. It is found that longer drug review time resulted in more negative funding recommendations, which may limit patients’ public access to life-saving cancer treatments. The manuscript is well organized and the conclusion is reasonable. Only a few issues have to be addressed before its publication on Current Oncology:
1. It is described that “Median time from Health Canada (HC) approval to final recommendation was longer for drugs indicated for the treatment of gastrointestinal (GI) and lung cancers compared to breast, genitourinary (GU) and other tumors” Is there any possible assumption why does this happen?
2. According to Figure 1, drugs combating gastrointestinal tumors but not recommended showed much longer time for evaluation than drugs of other tumors. Is there any possible interpretation?
3. The font from line 143 to line 147 looks different from others.
4. Considering that the data was collected from 2012 to 2020, what is the relationship between evaluation time, recommendation rate and morbidity rate of various types of cancers?
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript describes the impact of oncology drug review times on public funding recommendations in a Canadian context. The content has been presented competently and will be of interest to researchers who are active in the field so the manuscript can be accepted after minor revisions. I urge the authors to consider the following points when preparing their revised manuscript:
(a) Verb contractions such as don't should be avoided when writing formally.
(b) The use of "vs" would probably be better than "vs." for versus.
(c) The font size changes at times (e.g. lines 143-148). The authors should be careful when copying and pasting to make sure that the template format is applied.
(d) Tables 1-3 need title lines.
(e) Figure 1 needs a caption and the authors should consider not using the defaults of the Excel software in this context.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The manuscript entitled “Impact of oncology drug review times on public funding recommendation” explores the cancer drug review time between U.S and Canada. The information provided in this manuscript attract both academic and industrialists. I have only few points, which needs to be addressed before it gets accepted for publication.
1. Add a legend (caption) for table 1,2 and 3.
2. Under Figure 1, add a caption.
3. Carefully review the manuscript for minor formatting.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
