Valuing treatments for rare disease

That is the topic of a recent white paper from the Innovation and Value Initiative titled “Valuing Rare Disease Treatments in Healthcare: Real Experience, Real Impact“. The report notes a number of challenges in assessing treatment value in rare disease (see my white paper “Challenges in Preserving Access to Orphan Drugs Under an HTA Framework”…

How much do orphan drugs cost?

The answer is provided in a recent white paper by Pearson, Schapiro and Pearson (2022). They use IQVIA data through 2020 across 389 drugs treating 1.8 million individuals. The study finds that while 5% of drugs with an orphan indication cost more than $500,000 per year, these drugs make up only 0.08% of all patients…

Orphan Drug Policies Around the World

How do you incentivize pharmaceutical companies and researchers to develop new drugs for rare diseases? Drug development is expensive and–by definition–rare diseases have a small market. One solution to this problem is that governments have used orphan drug policies to provide monetary incentives for innovators to research drugs for rare diseases. But which countries have…