Given the attacks on the biopharmaceutical industry by “pharmascolds”, one would think that all of the negative terms that can be used to describe the nefarious nature of the industry have already been used. However, Gary West of West Health seems to have come up with a new twist with his use of drug cartels to describe what some believe is an important part of the healthcare system. Here is what he had to say in a recent op-ed piece in the San Diego Union Tribune.
CHICAGO (Reuters) - When Medicare prescription drug insurance was created in 2003, the idea that beneficiaries with very high drug costs should pick up 5 percent of the tab seemed reasonable - but that was well before specialty drugs were invented that carry price tags in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Merck & Co. is out of stock and dealing with back orders of some of its Sinemet Parkinson’s disease drug products that won't be resolved until next year. The issues have resulted from manufacturing problems at the CMO that produces the drug for Merck, and because the drugmaker badly missed its forecast for demand.
The pharmaceutical company Merck on Thursday announced it would lower the costs of some drugs in its portfolio.
In a filing on Thursday, Merck said it would take a $2.9bn charge, or $1.9bn after taxes, on uprifosbuvir, which it bought in 2014 in its $3.9bn acquisition of Idenix Pharmaceuticals Inc. and is still in clinical trials. Merck said it now values the drug at $240m.
Merck & Co, one of the US's biggest drugmakers, will write down most of what it paid for a promising, experimental hepatitis C drug in 2014, partly because of the extreme success of other new therapies has left a shrinking market.
For its part, checkpoint inhibitor Keytruda initially appeared to record a beat with fourth-quarter sales of $483 million. However, that performance was the result of $40 million in “deferred revenues,” Evercore ISI analyst Mark Schoenebaum wrote in a note. Merck left that information out of the earnings release and the drug fell short of consensus estimates—$470 million—without the one-time bump.
Gilead's application is for a three drug combination of NS5B polymerase inhibitor sofosbuvir, NS5A inhibitor velpatasvir and pan-genotypic protease inhibitor voxilaprevir – given over 12 weeks – that could achieve a cure for chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) patients who have failed other regimens.
MSD's Keytruda (pembrolizumab) was accepted for the treatment of late-stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) after being considered through SMC's Patient and Clinician Engagement (PACE) process, designed for appraising medicines used at the end of life and for very rare conditions.
Over the weekend, AbbVie announced that its next-gen, pan-genotypic hep C combo had come up big in three separate studies, with 97.5% of patients achieving a sustained viral response after eight weeks of treatment. Patients across each of the major genotypes saw high SVRs, too.