So what did we learn from JP­Mor­gan week? Buck­le up, it’s go­ing to be a bumpy ride

I can’t leave San Fran­cis­co with­out of­fer­ing my own take on what I gleaned from an ex­tra­or­di­nary week, and I don’t just mean sur­viv­ing 3 pan­el events in 3 days. Big things are afoot in bio­phar­ma that will af­fect us all.

First, 2019 will be geared to an in­tense fo­cus on drug pric­ing.

OK. OK. No big sur­prise there, but in­dus­try ex­ecs were clear­ly hop­ing that peo­ple would give them some cred­it for un­prece­dent­ed re­straint on drug price hikes. And what they got was a dou­ble-bar­reled blast of pub­lic scorn and a tox­ic po­tion of hate and dis­gust in Wash­ing­ton DC. In­dus­try al­lies in DC right now are lay­ing low.

(L-R) John Car­roll, Lil­ly’s Christi Shaw, MSKCC’s Pe­ter Bach, Sanofi’s Kath­leen Tre­go­ning, PhRMA’s Stephen Ubl, Spark’s Jef­frey Mar­raz­zo dis­cuss the drug pric­ing con­tro­ver­sy at the 2019 JP Mor­gan con­fer­ence in San Fran­cis­co Jeff Ru­mans for End­points News

There have been a few dif­fer­ent strate­gies in play on drug pric­ing, but most con­cen­trate on rel­a­tive­ly mod­est sin­gle-dig­it list price hikes for the top-sell­ing drugs. If you rewind the game tape on pric­ing back to this time last year, there would have been at least a mod­est amount of ap­plause for that. This year, any­thing go­ing up, even if net prices are flat or in some cas­es slight­ly down, is a light­ning rod for crit­i­cism.

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