QDIS Blog

Price Pressures in Pharmaceuticals and Me Too Drugs.

by Ed Vawter @ 10:46 am. Filed under Pharma

Reuters recently had the following article about pricing pressures on the drug industry.

Pricing threat looms large for global drugmakers | Industry Summits | Reuters.com

One of the major ideas behind this article is that there are many so called “me too” drugs that don’t offer any advantages. Check out the following quote.

“Me-too” medicines, offering no big advantage over the existing products, will be the biggest casualties, according to Novartis AG head of corporate research Paul Herrling.

“Payers are less and less willing to pay, especially in big patient markets, for drugs that do not deliver a very, very distinct new clinical advantage,” he said.

I always hate to see this sort of attitude from major pharmaceutical leaders. I think this ignores the basic fact that each individual responds differently to various medications. I feel more effort should be spent on determining precisely which patients may respond to a given drug. With the advances being made in genetic testing it is possible to see who responds best to certain medications. However this sort of thinking runs counter to most big pharma thinking in that they want to concentrate on the largest possible patient population. I feel this attitude needs to change and the ability to determine precisely who will respond is essential.

I have had strong feelings about the “me too” drug for a long time. Imagine that your health care insurance will only cover one brand name medication for say allergies. There may be three approved drugs but only one is covered by your insurance. You try it and it doesn’t work for you. What then? Your doctor gives you a free sample of another drug that isn’t covered by your insurance and you find out it works great. Now you have a great drug that works for your allergies, but your insurance won’t cover it. This doesn’t make sense to me.

Given the recent advances in being able to determine genetic make-up of individuals I really think it worth while to determine why a given product works for a certain group of individuals and maybe even more importantly, why it doesn’t work in others.

This is what some call individualized medicine. I don’t know that I fully believe there will ever be a time when a drug is tailor made for one single individual. However, determining who, on a genetic basis, may best respond is a step in that direction and is how I see “personalized medicine” playing out.

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