Pharma companies accused of charging NHS twice for treatments
pharmafile | October 23, 2017 | News story | Medical Communications, Sales and Marketing | NHS, biotech, drugs, pharma, pharmaceutical
A new report published by STOP AIDS and Global Justice Now takes aim at three pharmaceutical companies who have taken on treatments developed with public money before then charging fees that now cost the NHS in excess of $1 billion per year.
The report points towards three treatments that were developed by public bodies, and therefore public funds, that were later purchased by pharma companies before being developed and commercialised.
The process whereby a pharma companies take on publically developed medicines is not an uncommon one, the money necessary to take treatments through Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials are not usually affordable to public bodies. The trade-off is that the pharmaceutical companies do have the extra funds to take a risk on developing a potential treatment, with the understanding that they could potentially profit on the treatments should they prove effective.
In the report, however, it notes that the companies actually priced the treatments so aggressively that, despite the public’s money being instrumental in bringing the therapy through to commercialisation, the public are effectively being priced-out of receiving such treatments.
The report noted three drugs where this was the case: abiraterone, a treatment for prostate cancer, infliximab, for arthritis, and alemtuzumab, for multiple sclerosis (MS).
Both abiraterone and infliximab are some of the most costly treatments available on the NHS, despite being partially-funded and developed by UK institutions. The former treatment, owned by J&J, saw significant delays before reaching patients after it was deemed too expensive.
Out of the three treatments, the behaviour around bringing alemtuzumab to patients is the most questionable – Sanofi took on the drug for the treatment of leukaemia, only for scientists at Cambridge University to later discover it to be effective in MS. Sanofi pulled the drug from market and relaunched it as a treatment for MS, however, with a price that had jumped from £2,500 per course of treatment to £56,000.
Tabitha Ha of STOPAIDS, one of the co-authors of the report, said: “At a time when our NHS is already strapped for cash, we must end the scandal of the public effectively paying twice for the same medicine – first to develop it and then again to stock it […] We need greater transparency and a radical rethink on how we fund the development of new medicines.”
Ben Hargreaves
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