No matter how hard politicians in Washington DC pound on pharma companies for setting astronomical drug prices, they can’t seem to change one thing: The most expensive keep getting more expensive.

List prices for the most costly therapies, of course, is not fully representative of all prescription drugs for a variety of reasons, not the least because patients almost never end up paying that full amount — a fact the biopharma world likes to highlight. But the update on GoodRx’s running list of the 20 most expensive drugs in the US is still illustrative of the unabating trend of megapricing.

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LONDON — With nearly a fifth of total sales coming from China, AstraZeneca counts the coronavirus-hit nation as one of its biggest growth drivers. The impact of the deadly epidemic has unsurprisingly weighed on the British drugmaker’s fourth-quarter results.

On Friday, AstraZeneca posted fourth-quarter sales of $6.25 billion, just shy of Wall Street estimates. Nearly $1.2 billion of that product revenue came from China.

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For all the talk about unmet medical need and patients first and so on, the key criteria investors watch for any new drug in the pipelines is peak sales projection. Are you going to hit the blockbuster mark, at $1 billion-plus, or are you going to be an also-ran in the sales department?

Of course, analysts’ peak sales projections by themselves are of limited value in many cases. When the PCSK9 drugs started arriving 5 years ago, Repatha was billed as a $2.5 billion peak earner. They’re nowhere near that, with new competition threatening current levels. And if Biogen’s controversial Alzheimer’s drug aducanumab (submission planned but not on the list) is approved, per chance, will payers cover it?

Maybe not. And then those $10 billion in peak sales assumptions would go straight down the drain.

But, analysts are analysts, and peak sales projections have to be factored in when assessing the top experimental drugs up for a launch in the year ahead.

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CAMELLIA-TIMI 61 was supposed to be the trial that would resolve the FDA’s concerns about Belviq as Eisa investigators showed that the weight loss drug didn’t increase incidences of cardiovascular events. Instead, it unearthed new issues that’s now led to its demise.

At regulators’ request, Eisai said it’s withdrawing both the original and extended release version of Belviq from the US market, where it earned a little more than $28 million from April to December 2019.

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Nearly a year ago, at the same time Roche shelled out $4.3 billion on Spark Therapeutics, Paris-based Ipsen bought its own billion-dollar acquisition: Clementia and their late-stage program for a pair of rare bone diseases.

Since then, the results have not been great, either for the drug or for Ipsen. And today, the company reported in its yearly earnings that it has taken a €669 million ($728 million) partial impairment on the drug, known as palovarotene. The company had spent $1.3 billion to acquire the drug.

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