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Live Conference Coverage @Medcitynews Converge 2018 @Philadelphia: Promising Drugs and Breaking Down Silos

Posted in CANCER BIOLOGY & Innovations in Cancer Therapy, Cancer Prevention: Research & Programs, Clinical & Translational, Disease Biology, Small Molecules in Development of Therapeutic Drugs, FDA Regulatory Affairs, Health Economics and Outcomes Research, Pharmaceutical Discovery, Pharmaceutical Drug Discovery, Pharmaceutical Industry Competitive Intelligence, Uncategorized, Value-based Drug Pricing, tagged @science 2_0, anti-cancer drugs, Big data, cancer cost, cost benefit, Data analysis, data sharing, DNASeq Data Analysis, drug costs, health outcomes, ICER, insurers, Keytruda, Keytruda (pembrolizumab), managing cost and quality, medical information, Medicare, medicare costs, merck, Open access, Pfizer, pharma industry, Pharmaceutical, Quality of life, science communication on July 12, 2018| Leave a Comment »

Live Conference Coverage @Medcitynews Converge 2018 @Philadelphia: Promising Drugs and Breaking Down Silos

Reporter: Stephen J. Williams, PhD

Promising Drugs, Pricing and Access

The drug pricing debate rages on. What are the solutions to continuing to foster research and innovation, while ensuring access and affordability for patients? Can biosimilars and generics be able to expand market access in the U.S.?

Moderator: Bunny Ellerin, Director, Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Management Program, Columbia Business School
Speakers:
Patrick Davish, AVP, Global & US Pricing/Market Access, Merck
Robert Dubois M.D., Chief Science Officer and Executive Vice President, National Pharmaceutical Council
Gary Kurzman, M.D., Senior Vice President and Managing Director, Healthcare, Safeguard Scientifics
Steven Lucio, Associate Vice President, Pharmacy Services, Vizient

What is working and what needs to change in pricing models?

Robert: He sees so many players in the onStevencology space discovering new drugs and other drugs are going generic (that is what is working). However are we spending too much on cancer care relative to other diseases (their initiative Going Beyond the Surface)

Steven: the advent of biosimilars is good for the industry

Patrick: large effort in oncology, maybe too much (750 trials on Keytruda) and he says pharma is spending on R&D (however clinical trials take large chunk of this money)

Robert: cancer has gotten a free ride but cost per year relative to benefit looks different than other diseases. Are we overinvesting in cancer or is that a societal decision

Gary: maybe as we become more specific with precision medicines high prices may be a result of our success in specifically targeting a mutation. We need to understand the targeted drugs and outcomes.

Patrick: “Cancer is the last big frontier” but he says prices will come down in most cases. He gives the example of Hep C treatment… the previous only therapeutic option was a very toxic yearlong treatment but the newer drugs may be more cost effective and safer

Steven: Our blockbuster drugs could diffuse the expense but now with precision we can’t diffuse the expense over a large number of patients

President’s Cancer Panel Recommendation

Six recommendations

promoting value based pricing
enabling communications of cost
financial toxicity
stimulate competition biosimilars
value based care
invest in biomedical research

Patrick: the government pricing regime is hurting. Alot of practical barriers but Merck has over 200 studies on cost basis

Robert: many concerns/impetus started in Europe on pricing as they are a set price model (EU won’t pay more than x for a drug). US is moving more to outcomes pricing. For every one health outcome study three studies did not show a benefit. With cancer it is tricky to establish specific health outcomes. Also Medicare gets best price status so needs to be a safe harbor for payers and biggest constraint is regulatory issues.

Steven: They all want value based pricing but we don’t have that yet and there is a challenge to understand the nuances of new therapies. Hard to align all the stakeholders together so until some legislation starts to change the reimbursement-clinic-patient-pharma obstacles. Possibly the big data efforts discussed here may help align each stakeholders goals.

Gary: What is the data necessary to understand what is happening to patients and until we have that information it still will be complicated to determine where investors in health care stand at in this discussion

Robert: on an ICER methods advisory board: 1) great concern of costs how do we determine fair value of drug 2) ICER is only game in town, other orgs only give recommendations 3) ICER evaluates long term value (cost per quality year of life), budget impact (will people go bankrupt)

4) ICER getting traction in the public eye and advocates 5) the problem is ICER not ready for prime time as evidence keeps changing or are they keeping the societal factors in mind and they don’t have total transparancy in their methodology

Steven: We need more transparency into all the costs associated with the drug and therapy and value-based outcome. Right now price is more of a black box.

Moderator: pointed to a recent study which showed that outpatient costs are going down while hospital based care cost is going rapidly up (cost of site of care) so we need to figure out how to get people into lower cost setting

Breaking Down Silos in Research

“Silo” is healthcare’s four-letter word. How are researchers, life science companies and others sharing information that can benefit patients more quickly? Hear from experts at institutions that are striving to tear down the walls that prevent data from flowing.

Moderator: Vini Jolly, Executive Director, Woodside Capital Partners
Speakers:
Ardy Arianpour, CEO & Co-Founder, Seqster @seqster
Lauren Becnel, Ph.D., Real World Data Lead for Oncology, Pfizer
Rakesh Mathew, Innovation, Research, & Development Lead, HealthShareExchange
David Nace M.D., Chief Medical Officer, Innovaccer

Seqster: Seqster is a secure platform that helps you and your family manage medical records, DNA, fitness, and nutrition data—all in one place. Founder has a genomic sequencing background but realized sequence information needs to be linked with medical records.

HealthShareExchange.org :

HealthShare Exchange envisions a trusted community of healthcare stakeholders collaborating to deliver better care to consumers in the greater Philadelphia region. HealthShare Exchange will provide secure access to health information to enable preventive and cost-effective care; improve quality of patient care; and facilitate care transitions. They have partnered with multiple players in healthcare field and have data on over 7 million patients.

Innovacer

Data can be overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be this way. To drive healthcare efficiency, we designed a modular suite of products for a smooth transition into a data-driven world within 4 weeks. Why does it take so much money to move data around and so slowly?

What is interoperatibility?

Ardy: We knew in genomics field how to build algorithms to analyze big data but how do we expand this from a consumer standpoint and see and share your data.

Lauren: how can we use the data between patients, doctors, researchers? On the research side genomics represent only 2% of data. Silos are one issue but figuring out the standards for data (collection, curation, analysis) is not set. Still need to improve semantic interoperability. For example Flatiron had good annotated data on male metastatic breast cancer.

David: Technical interopatabliltiy (platform), semantic interopatability (meaning or word usage), format (syntactic) interopatibility (data structure). There is technical interoperatiblity between health system but some semantic but formats are all different (pharmacies use different systems and write different prescriptions using different suppliers). In any value based contract this problem is a big issue now (we are going to pay you based on the quality of your performance then there is big need to coordinate across platforms). We can solve it by bringing data in real time in one place and use mapping to integrate the format (need quality control) then need to make the data democratized among players.

Rakesh: Patients data should follow the patient. Of Philadelphia’s 12 health systems we had a challenge to make data interoperatable among them so tdhey said to providers don’t use portals and made sure hospitals were sending standardized data. Health care data is complex.

David: 80% of clinical data is noise. For example most eMedical Records are text. Another problem is defining a patient identifier which US does not believe in.

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Victoria Hale: Pharmaceutical Pioneer

Posted in Health Economics and Outcomes Research, Healthcare costs and reimbursement, Indigent Nutrition, Personal Health Applications: Tech Innovations serves HealhCare, Pharmaceutical Analytics, Pharmaceutical Discovery, Pharmaceutical Drug Discovery, Pharmaceutical R&D Investment, Population Health Management, Prescription Drugs Costs, Uninsured and Underinsured, tagged drug costs, drug innovation, Pharmaceuticals on October 27, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Victoria Hale: Pharmaceutical Pioneer

Larry H. Bernstein, MD, FCAP, Curator

LPBI

Bringing Life-Saving Medicine to Those Who Can Least Afford It

Mitzi Perdue

http://www.genengnews.com/insight-and-intelligence/victoria-hale-pharmaceutical-pioneer/77900545/

The quest for innovative, affordable, and sustainable medical solutions for women has driven Victoria Hale, Ph.D., to start multiple companies. [iStock/© zodebala]

http://www.genengnews.com/media/images/AnalysisAndInsight/Oct27_2015_iStock_22080713_FamilyPoverty1381802542.jpg

http://www.genengnews.com/Media/images/AnalysisAndInsight/oct27_2015_VictoriaHale_Headshot5521815813.jpg

Three years into working for Genentech, Victoria Hale, Ph.D., faced a pivotal moment. Her career was on track to becoming a high-ranking, well-paid executive in one of the major pharmaceutical companies. Instead, she quit her job to create a whole new model for the way pharmaceuticals are developed.

Prior to Genentech, while working at the FDA, she witnessed an example of what happens to medicines for unprofitable markets. A pharmaceutical company was developing one new drug for two promising indications, one a potential blockbuster and the other an orphan disease. Corporate executives decided to focus on the blockbuster and abandon the orphan disease because it distracted the team from the more profitable indication.

Dr. Hale saw this as a glaring injustice.

“I felt that it was important to make drugs for everyone who needs them, regardless of whatever level they can pay,” she says. “People cannot develop medicines themselves. Experienced, trained professionals are the only ones who know how to do this. There are people who have medicines for any disease here, while 5,000 miles away babies are dying for lack of simple medications.”

Observing the inequities in how drugs were distributed, she asked a fundamental question: “What if we removed the profit requirement? What if we created a nonprofit model for developing pharmaceuticals?”

As someone with a Ph.D. in pharmaceutical chemistry from the University of California San Francisco, Dr. Hale was well aware that bringing a new drug to market can cost in the billions. Her strategy, with a future nonprofit, was to find drugs with patents that had expired or which were not being used because of low profit margins. Even so, getting governmental approval for a new use for an existing drug can cost $50 million.

Struck a Chord

Nevertheless her vision of creating a nonprofit model for addressing injustices in how drugs are distributed began attracting donors. Her first major fundraising success came when the Gates Foundation provided her with a $4.7 million check for seed money. In the years since, she has been granted $150 million in total for several programs. Other philanthropic organizations have continued to fund her efforts, and, surprisingly, if not amazingly, Dr. Hale was able to find an anonymous donor who provided an $82 million grant to fund low-cost highly effective contraception efforts.

Dr. Hale can point to many examples of how this nonprofit approach has successfully played out in practice. One example is the work that the company she founded in 2000, OneWorld Health, is doing in providing a cure for black fever. This is a disease that has historically infected a million people a year in India leading to 300,000 death annually.

Black fever, or visceral leishmaniasis, is a disease of the poor. A malnourished person may have a compromised immune system, making him or her vulnerable to the parasite that causes leishmaniasis.

“When I was first looking into black fever,” remembers Dr. Hale, “there was a treatment available, but the cost was more than $100, and families faced the choice of going into debt for three generations or allowing the family member to die.”

Dr. Hale learned of an injectable antibiotic, paromomycin, that was apparently effective against the parasite in the laboratory setting. It hadn’t been formally studied in people for use against black fever, and there was no money to continue further research on it, so although a cure existed, it hadn’t been proven and it wasn’t available for those who needed it. However, using her nonprofit approach, Dr. Hale and her colleagues were able to raise the $50 million from the Gates Foundation for clinical trials in India, and succeeded in demonstrating efficacy and safety.

Today, Dr. Hale, who was awarded the 2015 Award for Leadership in Women’s Health Worldwide at the 23^rd Annual Congress of the Academy of Women’s Health, and her colleagues are able to produce paromomycin for $10 per treatment. As a result, and combined with other public health interventions, India may soon be free of this scourge.

Another of Dr. Hale’s concerns is unwanted pregnancy. Her organization Medicines360 is able to provide an IUD that has a 40-fold greater success rate than the pill, it lasts for three years, and is sold for $50 each to women who lack adequate insurance. Medicines360 makes it available to family planning clinics that provide services to low-income women. The consequences for women and for society are incalculable.

Like OneWorld Health, Medicines360 is also a new approach to pharmaceuticals. Medicines360 is particularly aimed at pharmaceuticals for women, and it has a unique operating model: it reinvests profits generated through commercial sales revenue and puts these profits into advocacy, education, research, and development. The goal is to provide innovative, affordable, and sustainable medical solutions for women.

For Medicines360, profits aren’t the motive; they’re the means to a mission. Dr. Hale believes that her nonprofit can be a model for other nonprofit pharmaceutical companies and also for hybrid companies that could get part of their funding from philanthropists and part from traditional sources. She already knows that there are young idealistic people who will carry the model forward and who are pushing this agenda.