Knowledge Ecology International

Today The Lancet Commission on Essential Medicines Policies published the 74 page report on “Essential Medicines for Universal Health Coverage.” A copy is available here.

The report is rich in data, analysis and recommendations. The report endorses the delinking of R&D costs from drug prices:

Delinking R&D costs from the price of medicines

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KEI and others working in the drug pricing space are frequently asked about measures that a new President or Congress can take to lower drug prices, in the relatively near term. The following is a list of such actions, including some that would require legislation and some that would not.

A comprehensive list of possible actions would be much longer, and this is not such a list. Our list does not include suggestions from several other groups working on drug pricing that deserve consideration, and there is nothing at this point on price spikes.

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According to IMS, the global market for HIV antiviral drugs was $24.4 billion in 2015. Over the past three decades, drug companies have registered an average of one new molecular entity HIV ARV per year. This is a lot of money to spend on HIV drugs to induce just one new drug per year.

Today I took a look at data from the NIH clinicaltrials.gov database, to see what the industry was reporting in terms of trials.

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Part 1, and the GPhA report on cost savings from generics, and prices of generics relative to brand in 2015.

The US based Generic Pharmaceutical Association (GPhA) has issued its 8th annual survey of cost savings due to generic medicines. (Copy here). The data they present comes from QuintilesIMS Institute.

The leading shout-out from the report is that generic drugs saved U.S. consumers and third party payers $227 billion in 2015.

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The November/December edition of the Washington Monthly cover story (available here) addresses executive actions to lower drug prices in the United States, in particular the use of march-in rights or royalty-free license rights in the Bayh-Dole Act. The story uses the case of Xtandi, a taxpayer-funded prostate cancer drug developed at UCLA with support from the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Army, to highlight how those rights can be used by the executive branch to the lower the price of the drug. For more on Xtandi, see here: /xtandi. Continue Reading →

Attached below are the appointment calendars, with redactions by the USTR FOIA office, for USTR Ambassadors Froman, Holleyman and Punke.

Note: The files containing Ambassador Froman’s calendar are arranged alphabetically by month. Continue Reading →

KEI is holding a December 2, 2016 meeting on the delinkage of R&D costs from drug prices.

The venue will be US Senate Hearing Room SD-106, Dirksen Office Building. The meeting will take place from 9:00am to 2:00pm.

A copy of the agenda is available here.

For more information about delinkage, see: http://delinkage.org.

To register for the event, please fill out this form: https://goo.gl/forms/AbP2npqLRLYneLjk1.
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