Biosimilars in Oncology: Future Directions

Bruce Feinberg, DO: That may be a good place to finish because it is complicated, and over the course of the conversation today we’ve introduced that complexity at so many different levels.

There is a lot for viewers to take from this.

Again, this was great. It was informative. I had a lot of fun. When you can both inform and, to some degree, entertain, especially since we’re doing everything virtually these days, you can’t ask for more than that.

My thanks to all of you for this rich and informative discussion. Before we conclude, I want to go around the horn and get a 30-second final thought on the future of biosimilars. We’ll go in reverse order, so we’ll start with Karina and then Kathy, Michael, and Bhavesh. Karina, you’re on.

Karina Abdallah, PharmD: Thank you, Bruce. Just to echo what everyone else has said, I think that strategically, we are looking at a 1- to 3-year plan to disrupt the market a bit, make room, and make decisions that do look at overall cost of care in a long-term method.

Kathy W. Oubre, MS: I encourage everyone. We believe in the science and the innovation, and we do believe that biosimilars have a place in our long-term strategic plans to help bring down health care costs for the system and the payers, as well as the patients.

Michael Diaz, MD: We believe biosimilars have the potential to permit us to provide high-value care that is at more affordable to patients and society. That is an invaluable tool that we can add to our arsenal as we try to figure out the best ways to take care of our cancer patients. I’m glad they’re here. They’re here to stay, and we want to do everything we can to encourage their use as appropriate.

Bruce Feinberg, DO: Bhavesh, first and last word.

Bhavesh Shah, RPh, BCOP: What I want to see happen is more real-world evidence published by health systems and providers of their experience with biosimilars. That would really help the adoption rate increase, because that is tied to the cost savings that we want to see to adopt the innovation we have.

One of the biggest challenges that we have not addressed, until this day, is actually having payers control the market. Until that is taken away, we’re still going to have this impedance of adopting biosimilars to the full extent that we need to and that providers want to, so that is going to require some government regulation.

Essentially, we’re not even going to be talking about a biosimilar in a couple of years. We’re going to be using multiple biosimilars 1 week, next week, and next month. This is all going to be obsolete, hopefully.

Bruce Feinberg, DO: Thanks, Bhavesh. And thanks to everyone on the panel. Thanks to our viewing audience. We hope you found the Center for Biosimilars® Peer Exchange® discussion to be useful and informative, and maybe a bit entertaining. I’m Dr Bruce Feinberg. Be well, everyone.