After 24 Years and 35,000 Pills, the Real-Life Hero of 'Dying to Survive' Is Preparing to Stop His Medication
Lu Yong, the leukemia patient whose battle with the price of cancer drugs inspired the 2018 film 'Dying to Survive', has taken more than 35,000 pills over 24 years. Doctors have now cleared him to try stopping altogether — the endpoint of a story that helped push China to negotiate cancer-drug prices down.
The viral post did not come from an advocacy group or a government ministry, but it read like an obituary for an illness: Lu Yong, the leukemia patient whose fight to survive inspired China's biggest cancer film, is preparing to stop taking his medication — twenty-four years and more than 35,000 pills after his diagnosis.
When Lu was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia in 2002, the disease was close to a death sentence; before targeted drugs existed, most patients lived three to five years. The drug that changed that, the Swiss original imatinib — sold as Gleevec — cost 23,500 yuan a box, about 200 yuan a pill. He took one every day, 800 yuan at the exchange rate of the ordinary worker's monthly salary of barely a thousand. Within two years his savings were nearly gone. He has told reporters that he would wake at night drenched in cold sweat, unsure whether he would still be in the same place a year later; in 2007, he says, his whole wish was to live another ten.
His route around the price — helping patient groups source generic versions of the drug from India — became the plot of Dying to Survive, the 2018 film that turned his story into a national argument about the cost of staying alive. The argument worked. State negotiators began forcing cancer drugs into the national insurance scheme at steep discounts, and today many patients pay only a few hundred yuan a month out of pocket. Chronic myeloid leukemia, once a rapid killer, became a manageable chronic condition.
The next stage of that arc was confirmed this month: doctors at a Suzhou hospital evaluated Lu and cleared him to try stopping the drug altogether — halve the dose for three months, test the fusion gene that marks the disease, and if the result stays clean, quit the pills entirely. More than half of patients who reach this point manage it. Lu, who is 51 and says his health is good, has been counting what he will get back: his skin will not be so pale, the swelling in his legs should go, his muscles will tire less easily.
A drug-finance blogger who retold the story put the wider point plainly: Lu's twenty-four years track China's own progress from a market where one pill cost a day's wage to one where insurance negotiations have turned a fatal disease into a manageable one. The film made Lu famous for surviving a system; the quiet coda is that the system moved.
"Twenty-four years ago, I really never imagined this day would come," Lu told Beijing Daily. If the gene test stays clean, the man the film made into a symbol will do something quieter than any protest: throw the pill bottle away.