Jackie Syrop

CVS Health is considering a possible $66 billion takeover of Aetna, and Amazon appears to be positioning itself for possible development as a PBM.

As AbbVie’s best-selling Humira faces oncoming biosimilar competition, the drug maker is developing a new innovator product that could help it retain a hold on the market; new results from 3 phase 3 clinical trials show AbbVie’s investigational interleukin-23 inhibitor, risankizumab, to be more effective than adalimumab (Humira) or ustekinumab (Stelara) in patients with moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis.

Advances in research suggest that neurotransmitters other than serotonin and noradrenaline may be involved in the pathogenesis and treatment of major depressive disorder, and have pointed to inflammation as an important factor.

A new report by the RAND Corporation estimates the potential future cost savings gained from the use of biosimilars in the United States at $54 billion over 10 years, and examines future policy issues surrounding this important market.

Drug prices in several disease areas outpace other healthcare expenditures and result in inadequate availability of essential medicines globally, according to a recently published review.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has announced that, at present, it will not proceed with its proposal to use biological qualifiers (BQ) to assign international nonproprietary names to biosimilars.

A Dutch study reports that 24% of patients who switched from originator infliximab to CT-P13, an infliximab biosimilar, discontinued the biosimilar by their 6-month follow-up, mainly for reasons researchers termed “subjective” health complaints.

While no one argues that orphan drugs that treat rare diseases can be expensive, the drugs’ reputation for being budget-busters is not borne out by a data presented in a recent report by Quintiles IMS Institute.

Switching patients from originator biologics to biosimilars is associated with the potential for a “nocebo” effect, a phenomenon that occurs when a patient’s negative expectation causes a treatment to have a more negative effect than it otherwise would—essentially, the opposite of the placebo effect.

Anti–tumor necrosis factor drugs are expensive, and there are a limited number of choices for IBD treatment, highlighting the need to use every existing agent optimally.

Pharmaceutical manufacturers often pay significant rebates on brand-name medications to pharmacy benefit managers or health plans to reduce the cost of pharmacy benefits and promote their brand-name drugs. Traditionally, these rebates have been provided to payers—not to health plan members.

A recent study found that, while biologic agents improved outcomes in patients with inflammatory bowel disease, they incurred such high costs that they were deemed cost ineffective, particularly for use as maintenance therapy.

The number of patients with Crohn’s disease who receive biologic therapy is strongly correlated with the gross domestic product in 10 European countries, according to a recent analysis.

Insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers use step-therapy policies to require doctors to prescribe older, less expensive drugs first, which patients must fail to respond to adequately before they become eligible for newer, more expensive treatments.

Amazon may be in the final phase of its decision to enter the online prescription drug sales market, according to analysts. Although Amazon has declined to comment, experts believe the company will decide before Thanksgiving whether it will enter the marketplace.

A European study published this week finds that, at a minimum of 3.3 years after market entry, there was no conclusive evidence that many oncology drugs approved by the European Medicines Agency between 2009 and 2013 either extended or improved life in most oncology indications.

Indication-based pricing is a method used to reimburse drug makers according to a drug’s indication-specific value when the drug has multiple indications. A number of healthcare payers have already implemented or are planning to implement IBP, including Express Scripts, the largest US pharmacy benefit manager.

The number of people who had annual prescription medication costs of $50,000 or more in 2016 was 35% higher than it was in 2014, according to pharmacy benefit manager Express Scripts.

The FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System Public Dashboard, a new, user-friendly tool available to search the FDA’s adverse event database for drugs and biologics, has been launched.

A Brazilian study reports that adverse events occurred in approximately two thirds of patients with Crohn’s disease who were taking the anti-tumor necrosis factor medications infliximab and adalimumab.

The standard way to conduct mobilization in hematopoietic stem cell donors relies on using 2 original granulocyte-colony stimulating factors (G-CSFs), filgrastim (Neupogen) and lenograstim (Granocyte).

A study by Cristina Scavone, MS, and colleagues, published in Frontiers in Pharmacology, concludes that most biologic drugs used to treat cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, and psoriatic arthritis in real-world clinical settings demonstrate overall good tolerability

A study of Japanese patients with ulcerative colitis who were naïve to anti–tumor necrosis factor treatment found that patients preferred adalimumab to infliximab, but the researchers also reported no differences in the efficacy of the 2 treatments.

A large Canadian study of patients with inflammatory diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, and ankylosing spondylitis, reports that a high overall rate of adherence to subcutaneous anti-TNFs.

The rituximab biosimilar CT-P10 (Celltrion and Teva’s Truxima), which is approved in the European Union and under review by the FDA in the United States, showed comparable effectiveness to reference rituximab (Genentech and Biogen’s innovator product, sold as Mabthera and Rituxan) in a network meta-analysis.

In real-world community oncology settings, bevacizumab-containing regimens were associated with longer progression-free survival and overall survival compared with non-bevacizumab regimens.

Trends in data concerning publicly and privately insured patients with rheumatoid arthritis show that the use of bioloigic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) is on the rise.

When a patient fails to respond or no longer responds to one biologic disease-modifying antirheumatic drug due to a lack of efficacy or poor tolerability, switching to another bDMARD can be a safe and effective treatment strategy.

A retrospective case series suggests that low-level anti-tumor necrosis factor anti-drug antibodies in patients with inflammatory bowel disease may be overcome by dose escalation and/or addition of an immunomodulator, which can allow for clinical improvement in disease status.

Social media posts by patients with Crohn’s disease are a useful data set to understand patient perspectives on treatment with infliximab (Remicade), according to a new study.