Updated March 27th, 2019

NBC’s Tom Brokaw On The Incredible Effectiveness of His Cancer Drugs & How to Tackle The Debate on Price

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Longtime NBC newsman Tom Brokaw is living with multiple myeloma, and living well. But the drugs that allow him to live well with cancer are incredibly expensive.

“I’m now on Revlimid full-time,” Brokaw told SurvivorNet during an interview in his Florida home. “The Revlimid thing for me has been … no side effects whatsoever. I think that I’m doing as well as I am in part because of Revlimid. I’ve been very fortunate, of course, in not having a reaction to a lot of the very powerful drugs that I am taking … my bomb is Revlimid on a daily basis.”

Revlimid — or lenalidomide — is a pill that has helped transform the treatment of multiple myeloma. In newly diagnosed patients, standard doses of lenalidomide, in combination with other therapies, is used to kill myeloma cells. Later on in treatment, low doses of lenalidomide is used to keep the immune system on high alert in case the cancer begins to come back following chemotherapy.

But these groundbreaking drugs are not cheap — and Brokaw is keenly aware of that saying, “I have a blessing of having a great [health insurance] program … so the checks that I write for pharmacy are very, very small. Every time I do that, it makes me aware of the people who are not in the same position as I am, and how I think about them.”

Brokaw realizes that most people facing a cancer diagnosis have a very different experience. “An extraordinary amount of progress has been made with drugs and treatment,” Brokaw says. “We haven’t gotten the cost thing worked out yet.”

He called on the American people to work together to find a way to make great healthcare available to everyone. “How do we deal with this as a culture? Not the politics of it, but as a culture. We have the ability to do it; we have the greatest resources in the world. Let’s figure out how we can make it cost effective, how we can have a true testing program for efficiency and results, and that people will have access to those results.”

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