Kathy Oubre Shares Her Take on How the US Biosimilar Market Is Maturing

Kathy Oubre, MS, chief executive officer of Pontchartrain Cancer Center, explains the progress she has seen regarding biosimilar utilization and acceptance.

Transcript

What sort of gains have you seen for biosimilars over the course of the past year and where do you see this going in 2022?

Oubre: Our biosimilar market in the US remains in its infancy, but it is growing. And if you review the bodies of literature out there, NCCN [National Comprehensive Cancer Network] did a poster presentation early in 2021 that showed that for the therapeutic agents, they saw the most rapid adoption of the Herceptin [trastuzumab] biosimilars out of all of the biosimilars to date. And it was for patients who were on treatment or new to treatment. It showed this massive increase in access to care, and i also showed a cost savings to practices in patients. And then we continue to see those types of anecdotal evidence, or hard evidence, shown in that NCCN poster presentation. you know, Ronny Gal with Bernstein did an analysis in 2021. Again, narrowing that same thing: that biosimilars are playing a large role in helping to bring down and stabilize health care costs and increase access to care.

The COA [Community Oncology Alliance] biosimilars data are showing that same thing. It's 122 community oncology practices across the US and 2.4 million administrations. That's a lot of covered lives. And so, the US market is in its infancy, but it's really showing progress and maturity. And if you also then look at what it's doing with ASP [average sales prices] and Medicare allowables, it's doing its part in helping to bring down health care costs, without sacrificing quality.

I think we need to continue to believe in the biosimilars market and do what we can in working with our payers and our members of Congress and CMS to foster a healthy biosimilars market.