Dr Hope Rugo: Prescribing Ogivri to Patients

Transcript:

Do you plan to prescribe Mylan’s biosimilar trastuzumab to patients? Would you switch patients from the reference product to the biosimilar, or just begin new patients on the biosimilar, and will payer coverage decisions affect provider and patient choices?

There’s always a big question about whether or not you would—okay, now the biosimilar is available, are you going to use it in your patients? In everybody? Are you going to switch patients who are on the originator to a biosimilar?

I think that there are a number of issues that we need to understand. In the [United States], that’s very much driven by insurers and what insurers are going to mandate. For example, with biosimilars for the filgrastim, the insurers, very quickly, many of them said, “you have to use the biosimilar because it’s cheaper.” And then what happens is, the institution—I work at an academic institution—changes over wholesale to say, “Okay, that’s what we’re going to give people,” so [that] you don’t have to worry about what the insurance said beforehand.

So that’s one thing that I think often happens, and with the trastuzumab—and we also switch people because, you know, supportive care it comes and goes, right? With the trastuzumab biosimilars, I think it’s going to depend on the price points and what the insurers and institutions say about if there is a real cost savings, and then they will want us to switch over to the biosimilars, which I am very happy to do.

I think these are agents which are biosimilar, so I don’t have a problem switching over. And I don’t have a problem switching a patient either, I just took a patient off trastuzumab who has been on it for 17 years and has no evidence of disease. We had a big conversation about stopping the trastuzumab and I said, “I really would’ve stopped you at 10 years, but you said no,” and she’s moving away now. But that’s a patient where you may have a patient on it for so many years; if you could have a drug that’s 20% or 30% less, that’s a huge savings over time, so it’s possible that those people who are on forever-maintenance trastuzumab in the metastatic setting, that that will be a situation where patients are switching or switched.

I don’t think that I would switch anybody that was in the neo-adjuvant or adjuvant setting on short-term exposure to the drug. It’s going to be an interesting time to see what happens.