Author: Peter

On the drug pricing front, a major effort by the Trump administration to cut Medicare prices has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge...The president's "most favored nation" clause, which aims to tie drug prices in Medicare to lower prices abroad, has hit an early setback as a federal judge in Maryland ruled the administration didn't give the public a chance to weigh in...Judge Catherine Blake ruled the executive order was rushed unlawfully...After Trump moved to implement the measure in November, industry trade groups PhRMA and BIO sued to stop it. Blake's ruling is temporary and the Trump administration could still win the lawsuit...READ MORE

The new model will pay pharmaceutical companies upfront for access to medicines based on their usefulness to the NHS...The...model aims to stimulate investment in the development of new antimicrobials...led by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, NHS England and NHS Improvement, will pay pharmaceutical companies upfront for access to medicines based on their usefulness to the NHS...two treatments, cefiderocol (Fetcroja) manufactured by Shionogi, and ceftazidime with avibactam (Zavicefta) manufactured by Pfizer, have become the first two drugs to be selected to move to an innovative health technology evaluation process as part of the payment system...READ MORE

A federal appeals court...upheld a White House-backed rule to require hospitals to disclose the prices they negotiate with insurers for an array of common tests and procedures...The...decision...is a victory for President Donald Trump’s effort to make health care pricing more transparent so patients can be better informed when deciding on treatment...The American Hospital Association and other hospital groups had challenged the rule...They said it would require them to divert scarce resources, including to fight COVID-19, to the “herculean” and costly task of compiling health care costs, while reducing competition and causing confusion about patients’ out-of-pocket expenses...READ MORE

Jocelyn Konrad, Rite Aid’s executive vice president and chief pharmacy officer, said the mission of RxEvolution and the new store format is to unlock the value of its pharmacists to support its customers and communities...“The Store of the Future highlights the RxEvolution strategy as the whole store is reimagined and remodeled,” she said. “Whether it be the front-end merchandise and, in particular, the way we have reintroduced the pharmacist to our customers in a very different way that has never been done before. Historically, the industry kept that pharmacist back in the production end of the pharmacy and what we have literally done is pulled that pharmacist out to be front and center for our customers, so there’s always a connection every time the customer is in our stores.”...READ MORE

With more than 1 billion BD injectors called for in the global fight against COVID-19, the company is looking at ways to support vaccination efforts up close and preparing for the future delivery of pandemic prophylactics...Becton Dickinson...last month surpassed 1 billion pandemic injection device orders globally...The company recently stumped up $1.2 billion to expand its pre-filled syringe capacity, sketching plans for a new plant in Europe, plus upgrades to six of the company’s existing sites in the U.S., Mexico, Europe and Japan. Those moves are expected to boost capacity by more than 50%...The company also teamed up with BARDA on a $70 million project to expand operations and dial up capacity for traditional needle and syringe devices at its Nebraska facilities. That upgrade, set to wrap in summer 2021, will provide the feds with priority access to “hundreds of millions” of injectors for COVID-19 vaccination efforts, plus supplies for future pandemics...READ MORE

The U.K.'s drug regulator has authorized a coronavirus vaccine from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, the first clearance for a shot viewed as critical to global immunization efforts but whose exact effectiveness is uncertain...The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency based its decision on positive data from studies in the U.K., Brazil and South Africa, which showed the shot was able to prevent symptomatic COVID-19 in a majority of vaccinated participants and protect against severe disease. The authorization comes less than a year after a team of Oxford researchers adapted pre-existing work on different coronaviruses to develop a shot for SARS-CoV-2...READ MORE

The Trump administration...finalized a rule meant to make it easier for state Medicaid programs, commercial insurers and drugmakers to enter into "value-based" arrangements tying prescription drug payments to clinical outcomes... The rule overhauls existing regulations...Under these types of deals, payers negotiate prices with drugmakers based on outcomes and evidence-based measures like reduced hospitalizations or lab visits, and aren't accountable for the full price if those measures aren't met...CMS estimates that value-based drug deals emerging in the wake of the final rule could save federal and state governments up to $228 million through 2025...READ MORE

Authorities arrested a suburban Milwaukee pharmacist Thursday suspected of deliberately ruining hundreds of doses of coronavirus vaccine by removing them from refrigeration for two nights...Police...said the Advocate Aurora Health pharmacist was arrested on suspicion of reckless endangerment, adulterating a prescription drug and criminal damage to property, all felonies. The pharmacist has been fired and police said in a news release that he was in jail. Police did not identify the pharmacist, saying he has not yet been formally charged...His motive remains unclear. Police said that detectives believe he knew the spoiled doses would be useless and people who received them would mistakenly think they’d been vaccinated when they hadn’t...READ MORE

The amount of money flowing into the biopharma industry via grants and collaborations with nonprofit and government entities is a 272% increase over last year, with efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic accounting for 84% of the total for 2020...BioWorld has tracked 855 bio/nonprofit deals worth $14.66 billion and 630 grants awarded to the industry and valued at $12.72 billion for a combined total this year of 1,485 and $27.4 billion. Companies developing therapeutics and vaccines for the SARS-CoV-2 virus are the recipients of about $23 billion of those funds through 628 deals (42%)...READ MORE

Novavax Inc has begun a large late-stage study of its experimental COVID-19 vaccine in the United States, the drug developer said on Monday, after delaying the trial twice due to issues in scaling up the manufacturing process...It will enroll up to 30,000 volunteers across about 115 sites in the United States and Mexico, with two-thirds of them receiving the shot 21 days apart and the rest getting placebo, the company said...READ MORE