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Teva...agreed to pay $54 million to settle a years-old whistleblower lawsuit claiming it paid doctors—as speakers or consultants at “sham” events—to prescribe multiple sclerosis drug Copaxone and Parkinson’s med Azilect...Former Teva sales reps Charles Arnstein and Hossam Senousy sued the company in 2013, alleging the company set up a program to pay doctors to prescribe the drugs through speakers’ fees. The events weren't educational, though, and only served as a conduit for paying docs to prescribe the drugs, according to the whistleblowers...READ MORE

Over the past year, the FDA has approved a wide range of new drugs and biological products, including novel treatments and expanded indications for a variety of disease states...Here are some of our top-read FDA approval articles from 2019...READ MORE

1. Halobetasol propionate and tazarotene (Duobrii, Ortho Dermatologics)
2. Talicia (RedHill Biopharma)
3. Trifarotene (Aklief)
4. Siponimod (Mayzent, Novartis)
5. Diroximel fumarate (Vumerity, Biogen and Alkermes)
6. Fast-acting insulin aspart injection (Fiasp, Novo Nordisk)
7. Quadrivalent influenza vaccine (Fluzone High-Dose, Sanofi)
8. Solriamfetol (Sunosi, Jazz Pharmaceuticals)
9. Dupilumab (Dupixent, Sanofi and Regeneron)
10. Baloxavir marboxil (Xofluza, Genentech)

Christina Mattina, welcome to This Week in Managed Care from the Managed Markets News Network

Despite aggressive advocacy efforts by state-based pharmacy organizations and individual New York pharmacists, Gov. Andrew Cuomo this week vetoed legislation to help to rein in costly pharmacy benefit manager practices by giving the superintendent of insurance licensing and regulatory authority over PBMs. This regulatory authority would put an end to the lack of transparency, oversight, and accountability that has allowed PBMs to engage in anticompetitive practices to the harm of the state’s patients and small-business community pharmacies...READ MORE

Publix Pharmacy is celebrating a milestone. It recently filled its 100 millionth free prescription as part of its free medication program...“We are proud to provide a service that helps our customers afford their medications,” Publix vice president of pharmacy Dain Rusk, said. “As the cost of health care continues to rise, this program has become even more important to our customers and our communities. Too often, high prescription costs prevent people from taking medication as prescribed. When medications are free or available at a greatly reduced cost, that barrier is lifted, and our customers can get the care they need.”...READ MORE

The Food and Drug Administration cleared for market 48 new drugs through its main review office last year. Though that's lower than the 59 approvals seen in 2018, the agency's decisions still provided more treatment options for patients living with cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease and rare muscular disorders...Notably, the agency ended 2019 with a flurry of earlier-than-expected decisions, bolstering the 2018 count with several drugs it was scheduled to finish review on this year...It's unclear how or if the approval stream will change in the new year and decade. The first quarter of 2020, though, may prove a bellwether in the near term. Between January and March, the FDA is slated to make calls on a handful of impactful drugs, including these five.,,READ MORE

1. Aimmune Therapeutics' Palforzia for peanut allergy
2. Esperion Therapeutics' bempedoic acid for high cholesterol
3. Blueprint Medicine's avapritinib for cancer
4. Biohaven Pharmaceutical's rimegepant for migraine
5. Bristol-Myers Squibb's ozanimod for multiple sclerosis

Nicole Grassano, PTNN, Pharmacy Week in Review, this weekly video program provides our readers with an in-depth review of the latest news, product approvals, FDA rulings and more.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs has only managed to curb the supply of methamphetamines by less than 1% of annual consumption, proof that it has been a bloody failure, his main political rival, the vice president, said...Thousands of suspected drug traffickers and users have been killed in the campaign that Duterte launched soon after he won election in 2016...Vice President Leni Robredo, who was elected separately to the president, and recently served a brief stint as the president’s drug “tsar”, said vast quantities of the highly addictive drug were available because seizures had barely dented the supply...despite the number of Filipinos killed and the budget spent, the volume of shabu supply curbed didn’t exceed 1%,” Robredo told a news conference, referring to methamphetamines...READ MORE

The FDA failed to verify whether a program designed to help control the opioid crisis actually worked because of poor oversight, according to a study published...in JAMA Internal Medicine...The findings indicate that the FDA could not determine if the program to train more than 160,000 doctors on cutting back their prescribing of opioids did any good..."What's surprising here is the design of the program was deficient from the start," the study's senior author Caleb Alexander said...READ MORE

Drugmakers including Pfizer Inc, GlaxoSmithKline PLC and Sanofi SA are planning to hike U.S. list prices on more than 200 drugs in the United States...according to drugmakers...Nearly all of the price increases will be below 10%, and around half of them are in the range of 4 to 6%...The median price increase is around 5%...READ MORE