A real-world survey on expensive drugs used as first-line chemotherapy in patients with HER2-negative unresectable advanced/recurrent gastric cancer in the stomach cancer study group of the Japan clinical oncology group.

The regimens with >20-fold cost of conventional chemotherapy were used as first-line chemotherapy in two-thirds of patients and more than half even in the elderly population with HER2-negative AGC. This finding is important for future health economic studies on drug cost-efficacy.