a young girl, maybe 5 or 6 years old, had come to Yoram Unguru’s clinic with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common form of childhood cancer. One of the drugs needed for the treatment was methotrexate. The only problem was that the medicine was scarce.
“A lot of times we can cure kids of their disease, but we can’t do that without the drugs,” says Unguru, a pediatric hematologist-oncologist at Children’s Hospital at Sinai in Baltimore and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “It’s just so, so maddening.”
Methotrexate is not the only essential chemotherapy that clinicians are currently struggling with. Two other major chemotherapies, cisplatin and carboplatin, which are also generic injectables, have been in short supply in recent months. But Unguru has not seen this particular patient recently or even in the past year. He saw her more than a decade ago, when the country faced another methotrexate shortage in 2012.