Drug pricing
Drugmakers will have until the end of February to decide whether they want to participate in the second round of Medicare negotiations or not. CMS has until June 1 to send an initial offer for the adjusted prices.
Boehringer Ingelheim’s trio of late-stage schizophrenia failures on Thursday came a day after the Department of Health and Human Services hit back on the pharma’s legal challenge to the IRA’s drug price negotiation program.
Concurrently, a preprint from the industry-backed Vital Transformation found a 50% drop in company investments into small-molecule drug development.
According to BMO Capital Markets, Medicare coverage of Lilly’s Zepbound opens the door to using secondary indications to secure CMS coverage for obesity drugs.
The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review flagged five drugs whose prices were raised in 2023 with no evidence to support it. Meanwhile, the makers of these drugs have been reporting double-digit sales growth for many of these products.
A week after dining with Trump and his team at Mar-a-Lago, leaders at Pfizer and Eli Lilly have publicly stated that they intend to collaborate with the incoming administration on key issues affecting the pharma industry.
The EPIC Act has been proposed with bipartisan and industry support to give small molecule drugs the same protection against price negotiation as biologics, but concerns over how to balance the federal budget could prevent a short-term fix to the IRA.
The payment scheme will tie gene therapy payments to improvements in health outcomes—and could potentially boost the uptake of these sickle cell disease treatments.
Eli Lilly topped the list of the 20 biggest pharmas by market cap with a more than 39% improvement year-to-date in its share price. Other companies have not been so lucky.
GSK’s departure comes as the industry anticipates the incoming Trump administration and as it continues to grapple with the threat of the BIOSECURE Act and losses of legal challenges to the IRA’s drug price negotiation program.
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