TORONTO — Ontario’s Divisional Court has quashed the province’s refusal to fund out-of-country cancer treatment for a 37-year-old Etobicoke father and ordered a new decision by Oct. 2, warning the clock is “very tight.”Alex Shved has stage 4 metastatic melanoma that has spread through his bones and lungs and stopped responding to standard care. His oncologist applied to the Ontario Health Insurance Plan to pay for tumour-infiltrating lymphocyte therapy at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Florida. OHIP denied the request, then denied it again on reconsideration. Shved took the file to court, where Justices Jean-Marc Labrosse and Sharon Shore set the denials aside as unreasonable and poorly explained. A third judge, Justice David Corbett, agreed the decisions should be quashed but would have gone further and directed the executive officer of the Ontario Public Drug Programs to recommend funding.“The record discloses that he will likely be dead by Christmas if he does not receive the requested treatment within a few weeks,” Labrosse and Shore wrote..The court’s majority said the core of OHIP’s reasoning appeared to be that paying for Shved now would undermine a future price negotiation with the drug maker if Ontario ever funds TIL therapy at home. The judges said those reasons offered no real basis for that claim. The out-of-country program, the ministry has argued, is not meant to be an interim funding path for drugs still under review for public coverage in Ontario. Shved has called that a catch-22: the province will not pay now because it might pay later, when he may already be dead. Health Canada has approved the therapy, but public funding in Ontario has not followed. Treatment in the U.S. has been put in the range of $1 million to $1.5 million.Shved works in finance and has two young daughters with his wife, Agata Zieba. His physicians support sending him to Florida. He has also appealed to the Health Services Appeal and Review Board, written politicians, and said a win should set a precedent for other patients stuck in the same gap.Other Ontarians seeking the same therapy have been rejected and told to wait, raise private money, or both.
