Company displaying an obvious desperation with the 40% discount pricing teaser.
F.D.A. Panel Rejects Lilly’s Cancer Drug Tested Only in China
"... Lilly had promoted its application by saying that it wanted to use sintilimab as a wedge to break the stratospheric prices of cancer immunotherapy ..."
"Dr. Scott Ramsey, a health economist and cancer specialist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, was among those who were skeptical of Lilly’s motives. “Yeah, right,” he commented.
“Are they talking about the stranglehold on prices that their current drugs contribute to?” Dr. Ramsey asked. “Maybe they could start by knocking 40 percent off their price” for Cyramza — a stomach cancer drug with a list price of $13,400.32 to $15,075.36 per month — and Verzenio, a breast cancer drug with a similar price.
“I don’t buy it,” Dr. Ramsey said of Lilly’s price disrupter story, and instead chalked it up to a public relations stunt.
It is well known that the F.D.A. is not permitted to consider price in evaluating whether a drug should be approved. That means that any F.D.A. decision must be based solely on whether the drug meets its standards.
For that reason, Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an expert on the pharmaceutical industry, was puzzled.
“I’m
not aware of a company ever before announcing its pricing strategy just before an AdComm meeting, particularly one in which the general perception is that the F.D.A. was going to argue that the data don’t seem to support approval,” he said, referring to the agency’s advisory committee panel. “It does seem like a strategic ploy intended to inject a consideration into the AdComm deliberations that is not supposed to be considered.”
