The Business of Diabetes: CVS Caremark ' s Salvo in Biosimilar Insulin for 2017

Its already mid-2016, for nearly the past decade, I ' ve been pushing for so-called " biosimilars " or " follow-on biologics " like insulin to be legalized and then introduced in the U.S. (I first investigated this issue back in 2006, and published anarticle on it in January 2007). The reality is that without any form of generic competition, prices continue to rise with absolutely nothing to stop them. In recent years, there have been some hyper-aggressive price-increases from the insulin oligopoly, especially within the last 3 years or so. The reason: they all KNOW that their insulin analog patents are about to expire soon, so they ' ve made a shameless money-grab with huge price increases before that happens. The retail cost of a vial of insulin is now over $125 a vial, and that ' s for old varieties like Regular or NPH which have been on the market for like 95 years. I haven ' t even bothered to price insulin analogs!The Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. " Obamacare " ) finally legalized biosimilar medicines in the U.S. Before that, there was a lot of complaining and bellyaching from pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies that there was no regulatory pathway, which was only true for some newer biotech medicines. Because insulin was the very first biotech medicine ever approved by the FDA, its grandfathered under the law as a " small-molecule " drug (along with human growth hormone, another very early-generation biologic medicine), so there was no leg...
Source: Scott's Web Log - Category: Endocrinology Tags: Biosimilar insulin Lantus Lilly Merck Source Type: blogs