Estimation of Health and Economic Benefits of Commercial Peanut Immunotherapy Products: A Cost-effectiveness Analysis

IMPORTANCE: Commercial epicutaneous peanut immunotherapy (EPIT) and peanut oral immunotherapy (POIT) may offer significant quality-of-life improvements for patients with peanut allergy, but the cost-effectiveness of commercial peanut immunotherapies is uncharacterized. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate critical inputs associated with the cost-effectiveness of EPIT and POIT from a societal perspective. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: Economic evaluation in which microsimulations with Markov modeling were performed evaluating virtual children aged 4 years over an 80-year time horizon. The base-case costs included a caregiver-reported willingness to pay of $3839 annually for safe and effective food allergy treatment. Estimates of predictive biomarkers or oral challenges were incorporated after the first year of therapy with additional analyses of immunotherapy risk reduction of anaphylaxis and probability of sustained unresponsiveness (SU) to peanut after 4 years. EXPOSURES: Children received EPIT, POIT, or no immunotherapy treatment (n = 10 000 per treatment strategy). MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: Rates of therapy-associated adverse reactions and quality-of-life improvements associated with changes in eliciting or tolerated peanut doses were modeled along with quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs), anaphylaxis, therapy-associated anaphylaxis, and fatalities. RESULTS: In the base-case analysis without SU to peanut, the EPIT strategy cost less than POIT (mean [SD] cost, $154 662 [$46 716] vs $163 524 [$56 800]) and had fewer total episodes of anaphylaxis (mean [SD], 1.33 [1.55] vs 3.83 [5.02] episodes) and fewer episodes of therapy-associated anaphylaxis (mean [SD], 0.62 [1.30] vs 3.10 [4.94] episodes) but had lower QALY accumulation (mean [SD], 26.932 [2.241] vs 26.945 [2.320] QALYs). The incremental cost-effectiveness ratio was $216 061 for EPIT and $255 431 for POIT. Models were sensitive to therapy cost, SU rates, health state utility, and risk reduction of anaphylaxis. With health state utility sensitivity analyses, the ceiling value-based cost (willingness-to-pay threshold $100 000/QALY) was between $1568 and $6568 for EPIT and between $1235 and $5235 for POIT. If high rates of SU to peanut can be achieved in longer-term models, EPIT and POIT could produce savings in terms of both cost and QALY. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: In this simulated analysis, findings showed that EPIT and POIT may be cost-effective under some assumptions. Further research is needed to understand the degree of health state utility improvement associated with each therapy, degree of protection against anaphylaxis, and rates of SU.