With sales rising and efficacy questions swirling, Gilead faces calls to relinquish lucrative priority review voucher
Thirteen years ago, Congress enacted an attempted solution to a long-running pharma problem. Although infectious diseases that afflicted the developing world or could trigger pandemics presented one of the world’s most lethal disease threats, they didn’t present any sizeable market for drug developers.
So, following a proposal laid out by academics, legislators started a program that gave companies that successfully developed products for these diseases “priority review vouchers,” which they could use to get an FDA decision on one of their other drugs early or, more likely, sell to a large pharma for tens of millions of dollars. It created a backdoor market, whereby Big Pharmas developing lucrative products for cancer or autoimmune conditions would subsidize unprofitable but globally needed drugs and vaccines — all without the government spending a penny.
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