EQRx wants to turn drug pric­ing re­form on its head. Can it suc­ceed, or will Big Phar­ma stop it in its tracks?

Drug pric­ing re­form has been a po­lit­i­cal foot­ball for years, with both Don­ald Trump and Joe Biden cham­pi­oning changes dur­ing their pres­i­den­cies. Lit­tle has moved the nee­dle on Capi­tol Hill, how­ev­er, thanks in part to the drug in­dus­try’s pow­er­ful lob­by­ists.

In the most re­cent ex­am­ple, De­moc­rats tried to al­low Medicare to ne­go­ti­ate drug prices — an im­me­di­ate non-starter for bio­phar­ma pro­po­nents. Af­ter months of ne­go­ti­a­tion, the mea­sure fell apart in fa­vor of pro­vi­sions on a small sub­set of drugs that passed the House but marked a far cry from Biden’s promis­es and what many ac­tivists had hoped for. The bill, in­clud­ed as part of Biden’s broad so­cial pol­i­cy agen­da, now ap­pears dead af­ter De­moc­rats failed to se­cure 50 votes in the Sen­ate.

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