After the government capped the trade margins for 137 cancer medicines, companies manufacturing them announced their revised MRP on Tuesday. Of the 543 formulations — different brands and doses of the 137 selected drugs — the prices remained unchanged for 146, with another 21 formulations seeing reductions of less than R100, according to the data.

The average change in prices, of all the formulations, stood at just over R5,000. The average reductions remained low despite significant reductions in prices of some of the medicines.

Importantly, the prices of all all the drugs under patent, licensing, or other protection mechanism remained unchanged.

The price of commonly used patented immunotherapy medicines such as pembrolizumab (sold as Keytruda by Merck) — used for the treatment of lung cancer, breast cancer and several other indications — remained unchanged at R 2.16 lakh per 100 mg vial.…