Policy

Katie Verb, director of policy and research for the biopharmaceutical industry group PhRMA, discusses recent policy changes that have increased biosimilar uptake and additional measures that could lead to greater use of biosimilars and savings for CMS and patients.

The US biosimilars market is showing healthy vital signs, said Leah Christl, Amgen’s executive director for global regulatory and research and development policy, in a talk kicking off the World Biosimilar Congress 2020 at the Festival of Biologics USA in San Diego, California, while also reassuring the audience that her former FDA colleagues are still champions of their work.

The Center for Biosimilars® recaps the top stories for the week of February 24, 2020.

The agency will now review and act on original 351(k) biologics license application (BLA) supplements with clinical data within a 6-month time frame. Originally, such supplements had a 10-month goal date for review. In addition, applicants can now request the FDA refrain from taking action on supplements of 351(k) BLAs before a certain date.

The FDA and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will work more closely to support a more competitive market for biosimilars and interchangeable products. In addition, the FDA published draft guidance for industry about how to advertise and promote biologic products truthfully and announced a public workshop.

In an effort to speed more generic drug approvals, the FDA said it is changing how it assigns priority review status to abbreviated new drug applications.

How does CMS payment policy for Medicare, Medicaid, and 340B hospitals affect biosimilar uptake? A speaker at the recent at the 2020 Specialty Therapies and Biosimilars Congress explained.

In a wide-ranging state-of-the-industry talk, the clinical operations manager for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan discussed pending legislation, electronic prior authorization (ePA), and biosimilar uptake, among other prominent issues Wednesday at the 2020 Specialty Therapies and Biosimilars Congress in Miami, Florida.

Increasing trust in generics and biosimilars, and assuring their timely entry into the market, will yield greater benefit from these lower-cost options, according to a recent review.

An accompanying editorial describes the current regulatory process as “a thicket of special programs, flexible review criteria, and generous incentives,” and suggests starting points for reforms, including improving access to biosimilars.

The law made California the first state to bar pay-for-delay pharmaceutical agreements by making them presumptively anticompetitive if the nonreference drug maker receives anything of value from the other company.

Among the features of the Part D structure is a federal reinsurance program in which, when a beneficiary reaches the catastrophic threshold in a given year, the government subsidizes 80% of remaining spending for the year. Part D plans pay 15%, and patients pay 5% in this scenario.

A federal appeals court Wednesday struck down the individual mandate—the heart of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that requires everyone to have health coverage—and sent the case back to the federal district court in Texas to determine whether other parts of the law are constitutional and can exist without the mandate.

Under the draft guidance for industry, the FDA is proposing how manufacturers could import versions of FDA-approved drug products that they sell in foreign countries that are the same as the US versions. Under this pathway, drug makers would use a new National Drug Code (NDC) and sell the products in the United States at a cheaper price—but different NDCs will not be available for use by biosimilar manufacturers.

Looking at products that entered the marketplace between 2015 and 2017, an FDA report finds that greater competition among generic drug makers is associated with lower prices.

On Thursday, the Senate voted to confirm Stephen Hahn, MD, FASTRO, chief medical executive at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, as the 24th commissioner of the FDA.

Alberta became the most recent Canadian provincial government to mandate a nonmedical switch to biosimilars for certain patients on taxpayer-funded drug plans.

An agreement on the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), a trade deal that updates the North American Free Trade Agreement, has been reached, and proponents of biosimilars and generics have cause to celebrate after the removal of provisions that some said would hinder competition.

Trade representatives for Canada and Mexico met last week over the ratification and implementation of the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), and press reports say that the Trump administration is considering acceding to Democrats’ demands to reduce patent protections for reference biologics in order to get the pact through Congress.

HR 3 proposes targeting for negotiation those drugs that consume a large share of the healthcare budget and that have limited biosimilar or generic competition. Writing in a perspective article in The New England Journal of Medicine, Peter B. Bach, MD, MAAP, a noted critic of high drug prices, proposed a different set of targets.

With debate and argument over what is to blame for high drug pricing, this report sought to examine the executives’ reasoning and attitudes behind pricing decisions.

The European Commission has released a new report that highlights the role that biosimilars and generics will have in the wellbeing of European healthcare systems in the years ahead.

Universal access to affordable essential medicines remains an unmet goal, and while the World Health Organization has been attempting to address this problem through prequalification of drugs like insulin to help ensure access for patients in low-resource areas, costs for many products remain prohibitive.

The issue of whether to switch patients currently taking biologics to biosimilars has been playing out in Canada over the past week, as mandated switching begins in British Columbia, while a reference product maker fights against a possible similar change in 2 other provinces.

How much does the price of common drugs vary across the globe? A UK digital healthcare startup collected that information to display the disparities across 50 countries for 13 often-used pharmaceuticals, including adalimumab and insulin glargine.

Based on the number of bills coming through Congress, it is clear that biosimilars have become synonymous with decreasing healthcare costs. Even with only a few biosimilars commercially available thus far, the federal push towards these drugs has been pronounced.

President Trump’s choice to lead the FDA faced some questions, but not many, about drug pricing, according to various press reports about the Senate committee hearing Thursday regarding the nomination of Stephen Hahn, MD, FASTRO, the chief medical officer of MD Anderson Cancer Center.

With more choices available in 2020 for Medicare stand-alone Part D drug plans, beneficiaries should compare choices, especially if they are not low income or on specialty drugs or drugs not on the payer’s formulary, according to a new analysis.

The AARP Public Policy Institute has released a new Rx Price Watch report showing that, last year, the retail prices of 267 brand-name drugs that are commonly used by older Americans rose by an average of 5.8%—more than twice the general rate of inflation, which was 2.4%.

A House subcommittee voted unanimously Thursday to send a bill intended to stop sham citizen petitions from clogging the FDA’s approval process for generic drugs under the section 505 pathway to the full Energy and Commerce Committee.