Sen­a­tors grill Alex Azar on drug prices; Mor­phoSys sells rights to Darza­lex ri­val in $120M deal; Se­r­i­al deal­mak­er X-Chem en­ters new dis­cov­ery pact with Gilead

→ Alex Azar faced a group of skep­ti­cal sen­a­tors on Wednes­day, De­moc­rats and Re­pub­li­cans, as they re­viewed his nom­i­na­tion as chief of HHS un­der Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump. And for the bulk of the first half of the dis­cus­sion, the sub­ject was drug prices; as in, the price of drugs is too damn high. Azar, who wrapped a lengthy stint as a se­nior ex­ec at Eli Lil­ly about a year ago, was not known for dri­ving down drug prices. But he re­peat­ed­ly agreed that drug prices need to come down now. In one of the sharpest at­tacks, Re­pub­li­can Rand Paul told Azar he has a lot of work to do to con­vince the Amer­i­can peo­ple that he’s work­ing on their be­half, rather than Big Phar­ma. And he vowed to with­hold his sup­port un­less Azar could come up with an ef­fec­tive reim­por­ta­tion plan. De­spite the back-and-forth, Azar will like­ly win con­fir­ma­tion and isn’t ex­pect­ed to do much be­yond en­cour­ag­ing more gener­ic drug ap­provals as a strat­e­gy to rein in drug prices.

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