I found myself puzzled, to say the least, by a recent editorial intriguingly entitled “Biosimilars Are A Distraction.” What I ended up reading were several questionable economic and clinical claims I feel are worth dissecting.
After roughly four years of writing about biosimilars, I can finally say I attended the Annual Biosimilar Medicines Conference. This conference was valuable to get a closer look at Europe as well, not only to see where things are working, but also where they're not.
As we see more real-world evidence (RWE) released in the gastroenterology community, I wanted to learn how one patient advocacy organization is approaching biosimilar education, what challenges the organization is facing, and how the industry and FDA can better reach patients and physicians.
Last week, I had the pleasure of chairing the first day of the BioTech Pharma Summit: Biologics and Biosimilars conference in the gorgeous Porto, Portugal. (Don’t ask me how much I spent I spent on port wine in the days before the conference.) The conference was — shockingly — the first European biosimilar conference I have attended in my tenure as a biosimilars editor. (Even though Europe is leaps and bounds — and then more bounds — ahead of the U.S. with biosimilars.)
At the CBI Biosimilars Summit in January, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel comprising three experts, including Jesse Peterson, clinical development manager at Fairview Specialty Pharmacy. The topic of conversation was stakeholder education, which Peterson is well-equipped to speak about, given his position at regional specialty pharmacy. In his role, Peterson works with experts across the pharmacy operations team and manages relationships with the health system’s payer partners and manufacturers. He is responsible for sharing updates on the future of the specialty pipeline internally and with payers, as well as identifying areas where potential savings could be realized.
A few months ago, I read a fabulous Q&A in Managed Care Magazine featuring oncologist Gary Lyman and co-director of the Hutchinson Institute for Cancer Outcomes Research at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. In this day and age, we regularly come across surveys or discussions emphasizing how much more work we have to do in the education realm to ensure physicians’ comfort with biosimilars. But after reading Lyman’s interview on one cold, dreary January day, I felt buoyed. That’s not to say there isn’t more work to be done, of course. But it was reassuring to see a prominent member of the oncology community express such comfort and confidence in biosimilars.
Two employer experts lay out the challenges rebates pose, both for employers and biosimilar uptake, as well as the increasing importance of greater integration amongst employers and health systems from both a biosimilar utilization and an overall cost savings standpoint.
In the first of what will be a two-part article, I’ll share two employer organization experts' thoughts on current reimbursement models for biosimilars and how employers and manufacturers can to reshape these practices to bring biosimilars more regularly into employer negotiations.
As policy makers release new policies to reduce healthcare spending, it’s imperative that biosimilar companies emphasize that lowering drug prices and cutting reimbursement are not the same thing. The latter could have serious consequences for critical classes of medicines, including biosimilars.
In the first of this two-part article, I’ll discuss two current policies that could impact biosimilars in the U.S. — in particular, coding evolutions and the pass-through status debate — and some of the yet-unanswered questions they raise about reimbursement consistency between biosimilars and their reference products.
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