A pleasant Friday morning to you! Adam Feuerstein, here, reporting from the Pharmalittle campus, temporarily relocated to Cambridge, Mass., as your regular New Jersey host Ed takes the day off. Like the one-and-only Mr. Pharmalot, I enjoy my daily headlines with a hot cup of joe. Have a great weekend.
Italian pharma company Recordati said it will buy from Sanofi the global rights to an approved drug to treat cold agglutinin disease, a rare autoimmune disorder, for $825 million, Reuters reports.
The Medicare Advantage market is expected to grow in 2025, despite big changes from insurers, STAT reports. Health insurance companies will still offer older adults a lot of plan choices with low, or completely free, premiums. However, insurers have made important but subtle tweaks to next year’s plans that will force millions of members to shell out more for their prescription drugs and overall medical care than they do currently.
The adult obesity rate in the U.S. fell by around 2% between 2020 and 2023, according to data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, reports the Financial Times. Researchers said weight loss drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic — now being used by 6% of Americans — are likely playing a role in reversing a decades-long increase in the U.S. obesity rate.
The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, has sued insulin manufacturers and pharmacy benefit managers, accusing them of collaborating to inflate the cost of insulin, according to Reuters. Named in the Texas lawsuit are insulin makers Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi, along with PBMs Caremark, Express Scripts, and OptumRx. “Big Pharma insulin manufacturers and PBMs worked together to take advantage of diabetes patients and drive prices as high as they could,” said Paxton, in a statement.