A bill that would cap out-of-pocket insulin costs for the insured at $35 per month remains in limbo as the Congressional Budget Office told the two Senate sponsors of the bill that it will likely increase net prices for insulin, and will increase premiums for commercial health insurance and Medicare Part D.
The comments from the CBO may spell the end for the bill, which is effectively a Band-Aid for a segment of the pharma market that has ballooned in recent years, driving many to ration their life-saving drug.
“Spending for insulin and other pharmaceutical products would increase, CBO estimates, because overall medication use would increase in response to lower cost-sharing requirements,” CBO director Phillip Swagel wrote to Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Susan Collins (R-ME) on Friday. “Some use of insulin might also shift to newer and more expensive insulin products. Increased spending for pharmaceutical products would result in increased spending for health care overall.”
Three drugmakers control the more than $20 billion insulin market — Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi — as the current price of insulin in the US is more than 10 times that of 33 other comparable countries, even as the net price of insulin has declined in recent years.
Both Lilly and Sanofi previously told Endpoints News that they support the Senate bill. And Sanofi recently announced it would match the $35 per month cap for some of its insulins.
Meanwhile, in March, the US House of Representatives passed (by a vote of 232-193) generally the same monthly insulin cap along party lines. But the CBO has since said that the Senate bill would cost the federal government $23 billion over the next decade, which came to about double what the House version would cost.
While both the Senate and the House bills effectively cut what many of those who rely on insulin to stay alive will pay at the pharmacy counter, neither one hits the prices set by the pharma manufacturers, nor does it help those who are uninsured.
If you work in cancer biomarker and target research, chances are you use data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) to help you make discoveries. This comprehensive and coordinated effort helps accelerate our understanding of the molecular causes of cancer through genomic analyses, including large-scale genome sequencing. TCGA covers 33 types of cancer with multi-omics data, such as RNA-seq, DNA-seq, copy number, microRNA-seq, and others. Detailed analyses of individual TCGA datasets, as well as pan-cancer meta-analysis, have revealed new cancer subtypes with important therapeutic implications. A key value here is the TCGA metadata. TCGA samples include extensive clinical metadata for diverse cancers. However, inconsistent terminology and formatting limit the utility of these data for pan-cancer analyses.
The first slice of data has arrived from a dose escalating study of Intellia’s in vivo CRISPR treatment for hereditary angioedema, and it’s a promising first step toward a potential once-and-done therapy.
The CRISPR crew at Intellia $NTLA reported Friday morning that six HAE patients treated with either the low 25 mg dose or the high 75 mg dose of NTLA-2002 experienced a 65% and 92% mean reduction in plasma kallikrein. The low-dose group experienced a 91% reduction in HAE attacks after the drug was used to knock out the KLKB1 gene in liver cells.
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Although “pay-for-delay” agreements and other egregious generic-blocking tactics may be in the rearview mirror, a new report from the nonprofit I-Mak explains how companies are still looking to protect the next generation of blockbusters with piles of new patents.
While some industry insiders point to a broken system that incentivizes these dozens and dozens of new patents — on average there are 74 granted patents on each of America’s 10 top-selling drugs — drugmakers have filed more than 140 patent applications on average per drug, and about two-thirds of those filings came after the approval.
While Moderna has been focused on building out its manufacturing apparatus in North America, Europe and Africa, the company appears to be turning toward Japan for its next act.
According to a report from Nikkei Asia, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said the company would like to build a facility in Japan as well as centralize all processes, including manufacturing, into a single facility.
While no other details on the manufacturing site were offered, such as location and timing, Bancel said the site would ideally manufacture vaccines for Covid-19, flu and other diseases. Endpoints News reached out to Moderna to get more details on the matter but they did not respond by press time.
The Department of Health and Human Services is taking the next step in its campaign to encourage Covid-19 vaccinations. The new fall “We Can Do This” ads move past the initial message to get a vaccine and asks Americans — especially people aged 50 and older — to get an “updated vaccine.”
Updated or bivalent boosters are the newer Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines that add Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 components to the original vaccine — the CDC and HHS both recommended the shots earlier this month.
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GSK now has dozens more Zantac lawsuits to contend with.
Plaintiffs on Wednesday filed 88 suits against GSK in Delaware court on behalf of more than 7,000 claimants who allege the popular ranitidine heartburn products caused a range of cancers. Pfizer, Boehringer Ingelheim and Sanofi, which owned Zantac rights at various points in time, were also named in the suit, in addition to Thermo Fisher’s Patheon Manufacturing Services.
WARN notices in California have shed light on some of the inner workings of biotech and pharma — and newly unveiled notices point at two of the industry’s largest players.
AbbVie and Bristol Myers Squibb separately notified the state earlier this week that they plan on letting go 360 employees combined by the end of November — almost 100 at AbbVie and the rest from Bristol Myers.
AbbVie did not respond to repeated attempts for clarification from Endpoints News.
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Illinois-based pharma company Akorn, which filed for bankruptcy back in 2020, has now agreed to pay $7.9 million to resolve allegations that it caused Medicare to pay false claims related to generic drugs that had already transitioned to OTC products.
As part of the settlement, the DOJ said Akorn admitted to delaying its conversion of certain generics — the NSAID pain drug diclofenac, and the antihistamines olopatadine and azelastine — from prescription-only to OTC status.
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While CMS drug price negotiations won’t actually kick off until 2026, a group of more than two dozen Republican senators is already raising questions about how this new law will be implemented.
The partisan law (all Democrats in the House and Senate voted for it, and all Republicans voted against it) includes not only Medicare price negotiations but mandatory inflation-related rebates that will begin next year, as well as million-dollar fines for noncompliance.
Bioscience & Technology Business Center The University of Kansas Lawrence, Kansas
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