For years Con­gress has raised con­cerns with the way some drug­mak­ers pay to de­lay gener­ic ver­sions of their brand­ed block­busters, as well as oth­er patent and ever­green­ing tech­niques to add to their sales of old­er prod­ucts.

These games and oth­er ob­fus­ca­tion tac­tics have long ex­tend­ed to drug pric­ing too. Find­ing in­for­ma­tion on the price of a new drug, or even bet­ter, what some­one will ac­tu­al­ly have to pay out of pock­et for that new drug (which is usu­al­ly not the same as the WAC or list price that’s an­nounced), can be ex­ceed­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to find or un­der­stand. Some­times com­pa­nies will an­nounce the list price for a new drug, but oth­er times that an­nounce­ment will come lat­er, or be buried in an SEC fil­ing, or on­ly dis­cov­er­able pub­licly in a gov­ern­ment data­base years lat­er.

Take, for ex­am­ple, the re­cent FDA ap­proval of Vi­a­tris’ new in­ter­change­able biosim­i­lar Sem­glee, which the­o­ret­i­cal­ly will serve as much-need­ed com­pe­ti­tion in an al­ways ex­pen­sive in­sulin mar­ket.

The price for this in­ter­change­able Sem­glee was sup­posed to come down to about $100, ac­cord­ing to an Ax­ios re­port, which, if true, would be al­most one-third the price of its ref­er­ence prod­uct, Sanofi’s block­buster Lan­tus.

How­ev­er, a Vi­a­tris spokesper­son told me, and again lat­er con­firmed, that the ac­tu­al price of the in­ter­change­able ver­sion of Sem­glee has not been re­leased yet, and won’t be re­leased un­til the launch date.

Bob Her­man, the au­thor of the Ax­ios re­port, passed along an email in which the same Vi­a­tris spokesper­son con­firmed, “That’s right re­gard­ing pric­ing.”

But the same spokesper­son ex­plained to me: “Ax­ios ref­er­enced cur­rent pric­ing in­for­ma­tion in their re­port­ing,” and the spokesper­son point­ed to a press re­lease from Au­gust 2020, not­ing Sem­glee’s WAC of about $150 per pack­age of five 3ml pens and $98.65 per 10ml vial, which it said is the low­est WAC for any long-act­ing in­sulin glargine on the mar­ket. The list price of Sem­glee pen is equiv­a­lent to the Lan­tus launch price in 2007, and the Sem­glee vial is list­ed at Lan­tus’s 2010 pric­ing.

But again, the spokesper­son did not say if this will or won’t be the price of the new in­ter­change­able Sem­glee, but said in­stead, “We are not shar­ing pric­ing in­for­ma­tion of the in­ter­change­able biosim­i­lar Sem­glee at this time. Fur­ther in­for­ma­tion will be pro­vid­ed at prod­uct launch.”

So why didn’t Vi­a­tris cor­rect the Ax­ios re­port, which was cit­ed wide­ly?

Vi­a­tris told End­points: “We did not feel the need to cor­rect the Ax­ios piece be­cause the re­porter had asked what the price was for the ex­ist­ing, cur­rent­ly mar­ket­ed Sem­glee prod­uct.”

The in­ter­change­able ver­sion of Sem­glee may end up be­ing more ex­pen­sive than that cur­rent­ly mar­ket­ed biosim­i­lar, which launched last year, so the $100 gener­ic in­sulin head­line of­fered good press for the firm.

Buried be­neath this one ex­am­ple are hun­dreds of oth­ers where the price of a new drug is on­ly lat­er, or some­times nev­er, men­tioned pub­licly. More sun­shine in­to these prices would be wel­come news for many con­sumers who con­tin­ue to find out how much their drugs cost when they get to the phar­ma­cy counter. This lack of trans­paren­cy sit­u­a­tion can be even worse in the case of physi­cian-ad­min­is­tered drugs.

As Con­gress at­tempts to ad­dress drug pric­ing, it would be wel­come news if there was a re­quire­ment that com­pa­nies dis­close the price of their new drugs along­side any new ap­provals.

As high launch prices, par­tic­u­lar­ly in on­col­o­gy, be­come the new nor­mal, it’s im­por­tant that the pub­lic un­der­stands ear­ly on, at the very least, what the list prices for those new drugs are.

The story of Amryt Pharma’s candidate for the genetic skin condition epidermolysis bullosa, or EB, will soon enter another chapter.

After the Irish drugmaker’s candidate, dubbed Oleogel-S10 and marketed as Filsuvez, was handed a CRL earlier this year, the company announced in a press release that it plans to submit a formal dispute resolution request for the company’s NDA for Oleogel-S10.

North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis made a name for himself in the 2020 election cycle as the darling of the pharma industry, accepting hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions, even from the likes of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.

Those contributions have led Tillis to attempt to re-write patent laws in pharma’s favor, a move which failed to gain steam in 2019, and request for a third time since January that the FDA should help stop “the false narrative that patent protections are to blame for high drug prices.”

Despite whispers of a busy year for M&A, deal activity in the pharma space is actually down 30% on a semi-annualized basis, according to PwC’s latest report on deal activity. But don’t rule out larger deals in the second half of the year, the consultants said.

PwC pharmaceutical and life sciences consulting solutions leader Glenn Hunzinger expects to see Big Pharma companies picking up earlier stage companies to try and fill pipeline gaps ahead of a slew of big patent cliffs. Though a bear market continues to maul the biotech sector, Hunzinger said recent deals indicate that pharma companies are still paying above current trading prices.

Following the Supreme Court’s historic decision on Friday to overturn Americans’ constitutional right to an abortion after almost 50 years, Attorney General Merrick Garland sought to somewhat reassure women that states will not be able to ban the prescription drug sometimes used for abortions.

Following the decision, the New England Journal of Medicine also published an editorial strongly condemning the reversal, saying it “serves American families poorly, putting their health, safety, finances, and futures at risk.”