Inside The Pricing Of A $300,000-A-Year Drug

Last night, NPS Pharmaceuticals announced that it was pricing Gattex, its drug for short bowel syndrome, at $295,000 per patient per year, about triple what analysts on Wall Street expected. It is the fourth drug approved in 2012 to be priced at more than $200,000 per patient per year. The others are: Kalydeco for cystic fibrosis (maker :Vertex Pharmaceuticals); Elelyso for Gaucher's disease (Protalix and Pfizer); and Juxtapid for homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia (Aegerion Pharmaceuticals.) That represents 10% of the drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration last year and a 44% increase in the number of such high-priced rare disease drugs on the market.
Source: Forbes.com Healthcare News - Category: Pharmaceuticals Authors: Source Type: news