Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Adebrelimab

We only considered the direct medical costs, including the cost of drugs, tests, follow-up, end-of-life care, and management of adverse reactions of grade 3 or higher with an incidence greater than 5% (Table 1). The cost of drugs was obtained from the national tender prices (Yaozhi Net, 2022 ). However, adebrelimab is not yet on the market, and thus, we could not obtain its exact price. We estimated the plausible price of adebrelimab in China (converted to the price required per cycle) based on the price of sintilimab (Yaozhi Net, 2022 ), a drug developed in China ($334.9/200 mg). Other costs were sourced from published literature and adjusted to the prices in 2021 using the China Statistics Bureau Medical Price Index (National Bureau of Statistics, 2021 ). All costs were converted using the average exchange rate in 2021 and expressed in US dollars ($1 = 6.45 RMB). It should be pointed out that apart from body weight, body surface area, and creatinine clearance, no other parameters can affect the cost of drugs. As the relevant data on the quality of life were not available in the CAPSTONE-1 trial (Wang et al., 2022 (link)), the utility of PFS and PD was assessed from published literature in China (Table 1) (Kang et al., 2021 (link)). We considered the disutility of adverse reactions of grade 3 or higher with an incidence greater than 5% to reduce the impact of using the same utility values for both treatment groups in the model. Both costs and health utilities were discounted, and the discounted values were set at 5% per year (Table 1) (Liu et al., 2011 ).