Discount Drugs

I liked the headline of a story in FierceBiotech in early April:  “Samsung Plans Ambitious Rollout of Biosims at Deep Discounts” (FB story).  Samsung is best known in the US for its attractively-priced consumer electronics (like my TV) but is an industrial conglomerate ala the Japanese keiretsu so adding making “discount” generic biological pharmaceuticals to [...]

More Bang for the Buck

As an amateur economist, I’ve thought that one mechanism for increasing the availability and affordability of medicines in the low- and moderate income countries is that in which volume purchasers, like governments, pool their orders, put out a request for bids (make a tender offer), and have an agent negotiate a supply contract with interested [...]

Crossing My Desk

I noted a number of news items over the past couple weeks that I thought are relevant to the business of global health and worth noting.  Here is what caught my attention: “A serious flaw in the imagined future of oncology” The imagined future of personalized cancer therapy hit a speed bump recently when a [...]

Drug Bust

A couple weeks ago I noted that a major summer story was the growing shortage of lower-margin, off-patent but still medically important drugs, particularly several that are the mainstays of cancer chemotherapy (my post of 9/8/11, “Market Failure in the US”).  And it was reported this week that the shortage of the latter is not [...]

Biosimilar Fever

Last week, I wrote about the moves of the big pharma multinational companies (MNCs) to increase their presence in the global drug market with “branded generic” drugs (that is, not patent-protected but sold by an MNC with the implication of higher quality).  I wondered if the MNCs were also aiming at the public sector market, [...]

Generics Play

Generic drugs, once dismissed as inferior “copy-cats” by the mainstream pharma companies, are now an important part of the industry’s future.  For the past five years, the share of $400 billion world drug sales attributed to generic drugs has increased at a 10% annual rate and is predicted to increase to a 28% share by [...]

Market Failure in the US

One of the big health care stories over the summer was the growing shortages of generic cancer drugs.  While I did not read that the shortages resulted in any deaths, the treatment protocols of some patients were changed to use alternative and possibly less effective drugs or were delayed, creating much anxiety (see Boston Globe [...]