Hedge Fund Billionaires Are New Target for Hepatitis C Cure Protests

 The New York City home and offices of former hedge fund manager Julian H. Robertson were targeted by protest groups in a series of simultaneous direct actions in early May. Robertson is ranked No. 512 on Forbes' list of "the world's billionaires" with a reported net worth of $3.4 billion. "Robertson is making a killing off of people with Hep C," read one sign.

The protests targeted high profile hedge fund investors who have reaped substantial profits from the California-based pharmaceutical giant Gilead Sciences. Hedge Clippers, a coalition of labor, community and social justice groups including VOCAL-NY, seeks to draw links between hedge funds and income inequality, mass imprisonment, climate change, health disparities, and other challenges. Gilead has been targeted because of what has been called "exorbitant" pricing for its groundbreaking new class of drugs that can cure hepatitis C virus (HCV), such as Sovaldi, and the enormous profits they have generated.

HCV infection "is the most common chronic blood borne infection in the United States [and] approximately 3.2 million persons are chronically infected," according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). About 150 million people around the globe are living with HCV -- disproportionately the poor, uninsured and incarcerated -- which in its advanced stages can cause cirrhosis or liver cancer.

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Hepatitis C: Drug Prices, Lack of Testing are Challenges

The tougher challenge, discussed at a closing day session led by the World Health Organization is finding a way to step up testing.  “Treating patients is not difficult; finding them is,” Peck said, "You can't treat what you haven't found."

Despite the wealth of choices physicians have in finding drugs to treat hepatitis C infection, two challenges remain in eradicating the disease—drug price and lack of global screening for the virus.
“Price is solvable,” said Markus Peck, MD, the outgoing secretary of the European Society for the Study of the Liver (EASL) interviewed at the International Liver Congress in Vienna, Austria.
“Pharma has to make some money on these drugs,” Peck said, since their cost of developing them has been high, “but as there is more competition we are quite sure the price will go down.”

There are currently 7 different classifications of drugs that fight hepatitis C. Those are nucleoside and nucleotide NS5B polymerase inhibitors, nucleoside analogs, protease inhibitors, nucleoside analogs, pegylated interferon, NS5A inhibitors, non-nucleoside NS5B inhibitors, and combination drugs that draw on two or more of those classes.

Not counting interferon, there are also 7 drugs or drug combos approved by the US Food and Drug Administration and another 14 in phase 3 drug trials.

 - See more at: http://www.hcplive.com/conference-coverage/easl-2015/Hepatitis-C-Price-Lack-of-Testing-are-Challenges#sthash.ggeNy7xf.dpuf

High Price Of Specialty Drugs Prompts Backlash

An unusual coalition of patient advocates and health plans, groups often at odds, are calling for greater transparency in drug pricing. They want to know why the drugs cost so much in the United States when in other parts of the world -- including Europe, Canada and Egypt -- Sovaldi and Harvoni are sold for a fraction of the price.

"We feel like there hasn't been a lot of explanation why drugs are priced at this rate," said Nicole Kasabian Evans, vice president for communications at the California Association of Health Plans. "There are about 12 blockbuster drugs set to launch this year, and we think it's important to peel back the onion and get a better understanding of why drugs are priced this way."

Medicines to treat rare conditions, called "orphan drugs," for years have been priced high to recoup the expense of developing a drug for a relatively small number of patients. But until Sovaldi, it was unheard of for a drug aimed at a commonplace disease to cost so much, critics said.

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Prices for the miracle drugs that cure Hepatitis C are collapsing

When California based Gilead Sciences announced a breakthrough treatment in late 2013 that cures most kinds of Hepatitis C, people were outraged at the cost: $84,000 in total, or nearly $1,000 a pill.

There are more expensive drugs, but Gilead Science’s hepatitis drugs’—Sovaldi and Harvoni—combination of eye-popping price, sales, and patient population (100 million plus worldwide) is unprecedented (paywall).

 
But on February 3rd, Gilead announced in its quarterly earnings call that it expects to cut the price of its Hepatitis C drugs an average of 46% this year in the US. That’s double last year’s discount. Some government plans will pay less than half the list price for Harvoni (a Gilead follow up treatment that combines Sovaldi’s active ingredient with another drug).

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NAMD Statement on Supplemental Rebates for Hepatitis C Therapies

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 2, 2015

Statement of the National Association of Medicaid Directors

Washington, DC - NAMD is pleased to learn that manufacturers of Hepatitis C therapies have finally come to the table to acknowledge and discuss the unsustainable pricing of their products. We believe this is an important first step in achieving the goal of making their products more affordable and accessible for Medicaid consumers and should produce significant savings for federal and state taxpayers.

However, we believe it is important to clarify several aspects of the current status of these discussions. While in some states the price negotiations have been completed, the process is at different stages in most other states. By their nature these agreements often take significant time to finalize. This is due to a variety of factors, including the time that it will take states and their contractors to fully analyze these proposals and then ultimately finalize agreements according to their respective state policies and procedures.

Irrespective of these early rebate agreements emerging for some states, Medicaid Directors remain concerned with regards to the overall sustainability and pricing levels. Directors take very seriously their role as stewards of the both the taxpayer dollar and the public trust. It is therefore important to ensure that these conversations continue in the evolving field of Hepatitis C treatments, as well as when new specialty pharmacy products become publicly available.

Source: http://www.medicaiddirectors.org/node/1136

New hepatitis drugs raise political pressure in Spain

MADRID - The arrival in Europe of better but pricier hepatitis C drugs has raised pressure on Spanish leaders over health spending cuts which sufferers say deprive them of life-saving treatments.

Hundreds of people have marched in Madrid and other Spanish towns demanding the government authorise doctors to prescribe the latest treatments for the deadly liver disease for whoever needs them.

Discussions over the new treatments have also erupted in the United States and France as the hopes raised by more effective treatments clash with public health budget restrictions.

- See more at: http://yourhealth.asiaone.com/content/new-hepatitis-drugs-raise-political-pressure-spain#sthash.augOhfHP.dpuf

Don’t look for pricey hepatitis drugs to come down

More competitors in the market doesn’t equate to lower prices 

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — If you’re looking for drug makers to start discounting those pricey, $1,000-a-pill remedies for hepatitis C soon, prepare to be disappointed.

Biopharmaceutical companies like Gilead Sciences Inc. aren’t showing any signs of easing up on the drug prices that have incurred the wrath of insurers and others in the health-care arena, who claim the makers of hepatitis C remedies are gouging the public. It also doesn’t appear that more competitors expected to come to market with their own hepatitis C medications are overly concerned they’ll have trouble selling the drugs.

From what the drug makers are saying, cutting the price is not their highest priority.

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Canada: Hepatitis C treatments are 'history in the making' at a high cost

BillyBob McPherson lived on Ottawa’s streets as a young teenager before “running away with the carnival.” The 55-year-old doesn’t know exactly when during his colourful life he contracted hepatitis C — he thinks it might have been in Texas in the 1980s where he had surgery and blood transfusions while working as a carny.

But without treatment, he believes, the disease would have ended his life.

Today, he is disease free, a living testament to the wonders of new drugs developed to cure the liver disease with few or no side effects. But he is also an example of the painful realities of the new treatments.

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Drug Prices to Get More Expensive -- Corporate Outlook

"If anything, 2015 list prices will grow more quickly than in 2014," said Richard Evans, a former drug-industry pricing official now an analyst at SSR Health LLC.

The $1,000-a-day price of a new hepatitis C pill has put more attention on the rising cost of drugs.

Yet the hefty price tags of new medicines like Sovaldi from Gilead Sciences Inc., weren't the only culprit in higher drug costs, according to drug-industry analysts. Price increases on older drugs played a big part, too--and the costs are expected to keep soaring.

Brand-name drug prices surged 14% in the 12 months through the end of the third quarter in 2014, adding $32 billion to drug spending, said Elliot Wilbur, a Needham & Co. analyst. Generic drugs, which are supposed to be an instrument for cutting drug spending, have also increased.

Read more: http://www.nasdaq.com/article/drug-prices-to-get-more-expensive--corporate-outlook-20150104-00034#ixzz3NyJmCyAw

Rapid expansion of HCV drugs, treatment population signal need for cost controls

A new report found that prescriptions for ledipasvir and sofosbuvir, the newest hepatitis C treatment, are growing rapidly but the minimal reduction in sofosbuvir prescriptions indicates an overall expansion of the eligible treatment population rather than the former drug replacing the latter, according to a press release.

“The high price of these new hepatitis C treatments and the expanding pool of patients receiving treatment signal a growing and costly trend in treating chronic medical conditions with specialty medicines,” Troyen A. Brennan, MD, chief medical officer of CVS Health and report co-author, said in a press release. “Hepatitis C is just the beginning, and we need to prepare now for the time when large numbers of patients could be treated effectively with high-cost medicines for a variety of common and more complex conditions.”

Using CVS/caremark data, the report compares prescriptions for ledipasvir and sofosbuvir (Harvoni, Gilead) with prescriptions for sofosbuvir (Sovaldi, Gilead) during the 8-week period following the launch of each treatment, the release said. The authors found that post-launch prescriptions for ledipasvir and sofosbuvir exceeded 7,500, which is an estimated 2.5 times greater than the 3,000 prescriptions for sofosbuvir. Furthermore, they found that sofosbuvir use has only declined minimally since the launch of ledipasvir and sofosbuvir, suggesting an overall expansion of the eligible treatment population and high utilization of each drug.

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