Ideas To Change Drug Costs Gain Momentum

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“People of all political stripes are thinking of ideas,” says Michael Werner, an attorney at DC firm Holland & Knight and cofounder of the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, the lobbying arm for part of the biotech industry.Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ALNY) CEO John Maraganore told Xconomy in January that as his company progresses its most advanced drug, patisiran, through the clinic he will talk publicly about pricing strategy.But those inclined to speculate might start with ICER’s final report on Entresto in December, in which it recommended that the list price of $4,560 a year should be cut 9 percent, to $4,168, “to prevent an excessive cost burden on the health care system.”) Amgen (NASDAQ: AMGN) of Thousand Oaks, CA, also struck a recent pay-for-performance deal with the health system Harvard Pilgrim after the launch of evolocumab (Repatha), which blocks a protein called PCSK9 and helps patients flush excess cholesterol out of their blood streams.Everyone, including doctors wondering how aggressively to prescribe the PCSK9 drugs, is waiting for massive “outcomes” studies with tens of thousands of patients to show not just that they lower cholesterol but that they actually make people healthier and save lives.Or, as John Rother of the National Coalition on Health Care, puts it, “What do you do with someone who has lung cancer but continues to smoke, or someone cured of hepatitis C who gets reinfected through drug use?” Last month Andrew Lo, a finance professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and David Weinstock, a researcher and physician at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, floated an idea that addressed several questions around paying for cures, whether one of the hepatitis C drugs now available, a T cell immunotherapy that has knocked out leukemia in early clinical trials, or a still-experimental gene therapy.

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