by Edouard Hubert at the Pharmaceutiques’ meeting
MARSEILLE, Dec 15 (APM) - France’s drugs pricing committee has called upon the country’s highest health authority to work closer together to help anticipate the arrival of expensive innovative drugs, a conference heard.
Dominique Giorgi, chairman of the French economic committee for health products (CEPS), announced on Friday that he has written to the chairman of the French national authority for health (HAS), Jean-Luc Harousseau to suggest they should work together to avoid unexpected high prices.
Speaking at a round table at the Pharmaceutiques meeting in Marseille, on Friday, Giorgi said: “We need to anticipate the arrival of innovation” to avoid dealing with them “on the fly,” just after they have obtained their marketing authorisation (AMM).
He said there were lessons to learn from the pricing negotiations over Gilead’s HCV drug Sovaldi (sofosbuvir).
Consequently, he wants to set up a joint “technical committee” with HAS to “anticipate market developments within a three-year timeline,” and better prepare the discussions with pharma.
Harousseau, who also took part in the round table, said he was “particularly in favour of HAS meeting with pharma at a fairly upstream stage of the development of the molecules. We therefore have a fairly good knowledge of the major, important and moderate clinical benefit rankings (ASMR I, II and III) that we will be asked for”.
However, the CEPS chairman pointed out on the subject of this “prospective committee” that in the short term there would not be another Sovaldi with a turnover of 1 billion euros per year. He added that if there were “five drugs at 200 million euros” the committee would be more able to “manage” such arrivals on the market.
Also participating in the round table, was the director general of the national agency for medicinal product safety (ANSM) Dominique Martin, who said that even though he was not formally a member of the new entity, “in fact, we are in the loop”.
He said the agency had currently been “caught up by economic issues” that theoretically do not fall within its field of expertise. He mentioned temporary authorisations (ATU) that allow market access to drugs that are often costly - or the temporary use recommendation (RTU) currently under investigation for the use of Roche’s Avastin (bevacizumab) in age-related macular degeneration (AMD) (APMMA 40370).
Martin emphasised that this presence of the economy in scientific issues posed “a doctrinal problem” to the agency, which had to think on the way of “managing these issues”.
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