Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
When typical drugs lose their period of exclusivity, new generic competitors arrive on the market with drastically lower prices. As patients switch from brand to generic drugs, the price of treatments declines. For biologic drugs, biosimilar uptake, however, is significantly less. In part, this is because biosimilars are difficult to manufacture so the price differences…
That is the question that a recent JAMA study–Mulcahy et al. (2021)–aim to answer. The authors use IQVIA MIDAS data to estimate sales price and volume in the US. These can can be used to estimate drug wholesale acquisition cost (WAC), but they ignore rebates. To account for rebates in the US they use SSR…
Getting from a mRNA COVID-19 vaccine to scaling to manufacture these vaccines for billions of people is far from simple: Manufacturing mRNA vaccines for the first time in a very short timeframe required significant innovation and remains a technically challenging endeavor. The process proved to be technically challenging as Pfizer developed a 50,000 step process.…
Health outcomes have improved in the US over the last 25 years. Clearly public health initiatives (e.g., reduced smoking rates) is having an impact, but another key key question is, what is medical technologies are driving these gains? Is it new surgical techniques, better diagnostics, improved medical devices, or new pharmaceuticals? This answer is difficult…
I have written previously about the need for distributional cost-effectiveness analysis (DCEA) which would increase the value of treatments who improve the health for individuals who currently have the worst expected quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE). I’ve written about this in AJMC and Health Affairs among other places. One key question many individuals may have is…
It stands to reason that policies that aim to reduce drug prices or squeeze life science companies profits are likely to decrease incentives to finance the research and development needed to bring a drug to market. Previous estimates claim that bringing a new drug to market may cost over $2 billion, and life science companies…
That is the title from a study from Lee and Bagley (2011). They examine the potential impact of direct to consumer advertising (DTCA) and the impact of physicians decisions not to prescribe a patient-preferred drug on patient retention. A total of 818 of 2,988 participants in a national telephone survey (27.4%) who had received DTCA…
That is the title of an article published in Pharmaceutical Technology today. I am quoted extensively. For instance, President Biden proposes to cap drug prices at genera rates of inflation. The article highlights some limits this would pose to value-based pricing that could evolve over time: Shafrin also says while Biden’s plan to penalise companies…
Recently, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Prograf (tacrolimus) in combination with other immunosuppressant drugs for the new indication of preventing organ rejection for patients who have received a lung transplant. While the FDA approving a new indication isn’t typically news, this is a noteworthy event because (i) it marks the first approval of…
Like generic drugs for small molecules, biosimilars offer the hope for reducing drug prices after biologic therapies lose their patent protections. But how big an impact do biosimilars have and how comfortable are physicians with using these substitute products? A paper by Robinson and Jarrion (2021) use data from France as a case study to…