The Arc
It’s a slow day today, so this is a brief Arc to prematurely flag an interesting trend: we’re a week or into pharma earnings season, and while a lot of the big names are still yet to the report, there is very little chatter about the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act.
As far as I can tell, the topic didn’t come up at all on the Novartis or Roche calls. That’s noteworthy in two ways. First, the companies didn’t think it was meaningful enough to proactively mention. Second, no analyst asked about it.
It may be that the market has fully digested the new policy, and there’s no there there. It may be there’s a general sense that there’s no real benefit to talking hypotheticals. Or it may be that we just have an non-representative sample and we’ll hear more over the next couple of weeks.
J&J did mention the topic, almost as an aside, and no analyst returned to the topic. Here’s how CFO Joseph Wolk framed it:
“Another item warranting comment is the Inflation Reduction Act. We continue to believe the IRA’s price-setting provisions are damaging to innovation and will prevent the delivery of transformative therapies and cures to patients. As we await adjudication of legal proceedings initiated by us and others, we did submit all requested information in compliance with CMS’ drug price-setting scheme to continue supporting patients’ access to our medicines that help them stay healthy and live longer.”
I’ll keep my ear to the ground.
Quick Turns
There is a new tempest, pushed along by Bernie Sanders, about NIH’s plan to give an exclusive license for a CAR-T cancer approach to a company no one has never heard of, run by a former NIH staffer.
My first three thoughts: 1) This sure does sound weird. 2) There is something funny about hearing about a wildly speculative technology being worth “hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars” (as the Sanders letter posits). 3) The market for NIH licenses in CAR-T has historically been a little slow because these technologies are still hard to develop and hard to commercialize, so this might be much ado about nothing.
If you want to go deeper on the whole issue, Endpoints’ Zach Brennan, on Twitter, pointed to this helpful Congressional Research Service report on the NIH’s role in drug development.
- The question of how patients think about the IRA is going to be a major source of conversation over the next couple of weeks — CMS’ patient listening sessions kick off on Monday — and this BIO panel gives a sense of where some of the patient concerns lie. It’s worth noting that the CMS input sessions are hyper-focused on individual drugs, so the broad worries from the BIO event won’t necessarily emerge next week. Suffice it to say, patients have lots to be worried about.
- The explicit point of this STAT op-ed is that it’s time for industry to think hard about insulin access and affordability in low- and middle-income countries. But the implicit point is almost as important: the insulin pricing and access issues in the United States have essentially been resolved.
- If you’re looking for interesting minutiae on the IRA lawsuits, it looks like both Merck and the Chamber of Commerce are beefing with the government about the timeline for their respective suits.
- It sounds like industry and the UK government are close to coming up with a policy that would revise the much-reviled “voluntary scheme” (IYKYK), per a not-particularly-detailed Novartis comment today captured by the Financial Times.
