Among the pharmaceutical companies’ many objections to the Biden administration’s drug pricing program is a set of provisions the industry says will warp how cancer drugs are developed. On Wednesday, AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot proposed a new solution.
“What we were asking — and are asking now — is a very simple fix,” said Soriot at the STAT Future Summit, saying that “the impact on health care costs would be very marginal.”
The problem, executives say, is that companies developing cancer drugs today generally start small and then go big. They seek approval first in a small setting, such as patients who have exhausted all other therapies, where it’s easiest in terms of trial size and length to show a benefit. Then they go into larger settings, such as newly diagnosed patients, where studies take longer but the revenue potential is much higher.