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Olivier Wouters
@ojwouters
Assistant Professor
@LSEHealthPolicy
Investigating access to medicines around the world
London, Englandlse.ac.uk/health-policy/…Joined June 2015
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Olivier Wouters
@ojwouters
In our new
@NEJM
piece, we explore how the US came to spend billions of $$ over the past decade on a medicine first approved more than 40 years ago
@wbfeldman
has put together a nice summary of our proposed solutions
@SeanTu2
@PORTAL_Research
nejm.org/doi/full/10.10
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William Feldman
@wbfeldman
1/ In 2008, @US_FDA phased out #albuterol inhalers w/ ozone-depleting CFCs, including several generics. Since then, brand-name firms have reaped $14 billion in sales on albuterol products--though the active ingredient went off #patent in 1989! nejm.org/doi/full/10.10 🧵👇
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Olivier Wouters
@ojwouters
8/ Above all, this paper is yet another call for transparency. We need to better understand what drives drug prices to have informed debates about pharmaceutical policy in the US and abroad. And for that, we need more data.
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Olivier Wouters
@ojwouters
7/ It’s important to reiterate that our study was small. Drug companies don’t often disclose how much they spend on R&D for individual drugs, so we couldn’t include many products in the analysis. Further work is needed to validate our findings.
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Olivier Wouters
@ojwouters
6/ This is not to say that we think drug prices should be set based on R&D expenditures! But if companies are to keep using this argument to justify high prices, they should make further data available to support their claims.
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Olivier Wouters
@ojwouters
5/ So we ran regression models to account for these factors. Even then, we found no association between R&D spending and prices in our main models. The claim that high prices are necessary for companies to make their R&D money back doesn’t seem to hold, at least in our sample.
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Olivier Wouters
@ojwouters
4/ Now, of course, there might have been other factors that affected the prices companies charged for these products, such as how common a condition was, whether there were competitors on the market, how long the product was protected by patents, etc.
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Olivier Wouters
@ojwouters
3/ If R&D spending explained high drug prices, you’d expect to see a strong positive association between the two. Yet we found no correlation between R&D spending and prices (both list and net), irrespective of whether we looked at prices at launch or in 2021.
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Olivier Wouters
@ojwouters
2/ We looked at 60 new medicines approved by the US Food and Drug Administration from 2009 to 2018. These were the only products for which we had data both on R&D expenditures (including spending on failed trials) and prices.
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