Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Biosimilar drugs for biologic treatments are analogous to generic drugs for branded small molecules. Switching to biosimilars after biologic patent expiry can save payers and patients money. Why doesn’t it happen more often? There are a variety of reasons but a paper by Bond et al. (2023) argues that the 340B program incentivizes hospitals to…
I previously covered research from Dickson and Kent (2021) that examined how the entry of generic drugs impacts the price Medicare pays. In that study, the authors found that “the presence of 1 generic competitor was associated with a 14.9% mean price reduction in the bundled ASP, 2 generic competitors were associated with a 32.7%…
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…
A paper from Nayak et al. (2021) in JAMA Internal Medicine describes how public-private partnerships have helped bring new biologic drugs to market. Using data on new biologic drugs approved by the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Reseach (CDER) and US patent office data, the authors find that: Twenty-nine drugs (42%) showed evidence of…