Thumbs Up/Down: Brent Saun­ders has the right idea on drug pric­ing, let's sup­port that

End­points as­sess­es the big bio­phar­ma R&D sto­ries of the week, with a lit­tle added com­men­tary on what they mean for the in­dus­try.

Brent Saun­ders signs off on a pric­ing man­i­festo the bio­phar­ma in­dus­try needs to adopt now.

Once some­one promi­nent stands up and pub­licly adopts a re­spon­si­ble pric­ing pol­i­cy on drugs, promis­ing to hold the lid on an­nu­al price hikes, peo­ple pay at­ten­tion. Cred­it Al­ler­gan CEO Brent Saun­ders with that stand. It’s not every­thing that needs to be done, but it is a big, big step to­ward fi­nal­ly lanc­ing the boil of pub­lic anger that has been di­rect­ed against My­lan and phar­ma in gen­er­al for rou­tine­ly pur­su­ing sim­ple price goug­ing schemes. This isn’t pure al­tru­ism. Bio­phar­ma needs to pro­tect ag­gres­sive pric­ing mod­els for nov­el drugs that make a dif­fer­ence. And un­less the in­dus­try agrees on this one, and fol­lows the Saun­ders path for­ward, that cru­cial strat­e­gy is di­rect­ly threat­ened. Let’s poll the ma­jors and see how fast we can get a con­sen­sus.

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Vice President

Alexandria Real Estate Equities

San Francisco, CA, USA