Practice

In inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), biosimilars have been available for roughly 5 years, but more evidence may be necessary to persuade medical community to increase usage, according to a study.

Canadian provinces encounter opposition in their move to implement forced switching of patients from reference products to biosimilars.

When providers get used to biosimilars, they tend to prescribe them exclusively, according to a study in The American Journal of Managed Care.

A gentle, persuasive effort to get patients and physicians to adopt biosimilars is likely to work better than a heavy-handed approach, say Canadian investigators, who recommend more study of how mindsets and prescribing practices are changed.

Kashyap B. Patel, MD, has worn many hats in the struggle to broaden biosimilar access. He is an independent oncology practitioner, a member of the Community Oncology Alliance (COA), and a representative of International Oncology Network (ION) Solutions, a large drug purchasing organization. Bringing biosimilars to a broader population of patients has involved negotiations with payers, persistence on Capitol Hill, and education, he explains in an interview.

The use of low-dose methotrexate in rheumatoid arthritis dates back more than 30 years, but despite these decades of clinical use, data on adverse effects have come mostly from observational studies rather than randomized controlled trials (RCTs), the authors say.

A recent year-in-review article outlines studies published in 2019 about nonmedical switching from originator biologics to biosimilars in rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, and axial spondyloarthritis.

The study aimed to provide insight into the real-world patterns of biosimilar initiation in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and ankylosing spondylitis (AS) in Korea by identifying patient characteristics and other factors associated with starting biosimilars using a logistic regression model.

Reference pricing may shift the mix of drugs dispensed from those offering the highest rebates to pharmacy benefit managers to those offering the lowest prices to employers and employees, according to a new study published Wednesday.

Researchers reviewed randomized controlled trials and real-world evidence studies on nonmedical switching; that is, switching patients who are doing well on their current originator therapy to a biosimilar.

The biosimilar CPT-13 (Remsima) is currently approved in Europe for all uses for which the originator infliximab (Remicade) is approved, including Crohn disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC), which are often referred to collectively as IBD.

The Center for Biosimilars® recaps the top stories for the week of January 6.

It is the first adalimumab biosimilar approved by the China National Medical Products Administration.

Just 6% of the Asian doctors said they felt confident using biosimilars in clinical practice. A survey of European doctors found a similar confidence level in 2013, but that level had climbed to 28.8% by 2015.

The findings indicate that interventions that leverage physician relationships may assist with increasing uptake of new, high-value cancer treatments in place of low-value therapies.

Using the biosimilar resulted in a significantly lower drug acquisition cost, at $533.40 in the biosimilar group versus $1261.90 in the reference group.

The Center for Biosimilars® recaps the top stories for the week of December 30, 2019.

The Inflammatory Bowel Disease Net, an official working group of the Swiss Society of Gastroenterology, has issued a new position statement on the use of biosimilars in treating inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

Autoimmune myasthenia gravis is typically treated with surgery, acetylcholine esterase inhibitors, corticosteroids, and immunosuppressive drugs like azathioprine and mycophenolate mofetil. Some patients have refractory disease and may require therapies like eculizumab (Soliris), which, while effective, is a particularly high-cost biologic that has no approved biosimilars in Europe or the United States, although biosimilars are advancing through clinical development. Rituximab, however, which is lower-cost than eculizumab and has multiple approved biosimilars, has also emerged as a promising treatment.

At the United European Gastroenterology Week 2019, held in Barcelona, Spain, earlier this year, a research team from the Netherlands reported on the prevalence of patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) switching back to the reference infliximab after a previous switch to biosimilar CT-P13, and found that switching back appeared to be effective in patients with IBD.

Using the same dosing as treatment for lymphoma and older age were linked with higher odds of complete remission off therapy.

Study findings in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), write the authors, suggest “that potentially more aggressive treatment is needed across the entire population of patients with RA."

At 6 months and 1 year, respectively, survival rates among the suboptimal responders who stayed on their index anti–tumor necrosis factor (anti-TNF) agent were 90.2% and 85.1%, respectively.

Using a biosimilar can produce substantial cost savings in patients who are receiving infliximab therapy for inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis (RA), but dose escalations, which are frequent for those who use infliximab, can increase the cost of therapy, even with a biosimilar.

During this week’s annual meeting of American Society of Hematology, researchers from Canada reported that using biosimilar filgrastim could result in substantial savings.

As yet, there exists no consensus as to whether proactive or reactive monitoring is the most appropriate approach in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) who receive infliximab therapy.

Interestingly, nocebo effects may also be induced by exposure to information shared online, through social media, through drug advertisements, and advertised descriptions or warnings about health-related conditions. The effect can be profound; the authors said negative expectations underlying nocebo phenomena have been shown to alter activity in certain regions of the brain.

While there is no question that falling prices that come with competition are cause for optimism in the United States, which is burdened by rising drug costs, some experts from Europe caution that a focus on price alone misses key reasons to use biosimilars.

Researchers from biotech company Tetra Therapeutics have reported that, in their retrospective population-based study of 56 million patients with inflammatory diseases, use of anti–tumor necrosis factor (anti-TNF) agents was linked with a reduced risk of Alzheimer disease.

In Crohn disease (CD), anti–tumor necrosis factor therapies like adalimumab have provided an alternative to long-term corticosteroid therapy and have reduced the need for many patients to have surgical interventions. It has been proposed that early treatment with biologics may lead to better outcomes and fewer complications—like strictures and fistulae—and findings from a recent study support that assertion.