Tag Archives: health systems

How Valeant, Anthem, and chirping crickets suggest Saunders’ social contract is doomed

Posted on by

This piece originally appeared in the Timmerman Report.

When Allergan CEO Brent Saunders announced his manifesto on drug pricing at Allergan just after Labor Day, he was met with acclaim and approval (some examples here and here). He called for a return to the social contract between biopharma companies and patients. In his view, patients understood in the past that developing drugs was risky and cost a lot of time and money, and therefore patented drugs would be expensive. Drug companies, holding up their end of the social contract, felt an obligation above simple profit-making—that drugs are supposed to keep patients healthy or to get them back to that state. That meant pricing had to take into account the public good, not just profit maximizing, and be reasonable. Moving forward, Saunders announced that, among other things, Allergan would commit to value-based pricing and to limit price increases to no more than single-digit percentage hikes per year.

These are worthy and admirable goals. But I look at other recent events and can’t help feeling his effort is doomed. Continue reading →

The innovators dilemma in biopharma part 3. What would disruption look like?

Posted on by

All opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk.

h/t to @Frank_S_David, @scientre, and the LinkedIn Group Big Ideas in Pharma Innovation and R&D Productivity for links and ideas

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here.

In the previous parts to this series I’ve covered both why the biopharma industry is ripe for disruption, and what the markets might be that could support a nascent, potentially disruptive technology until it matures enough to allow it to supplant the current dominant industry players.  In this final part I’d like to ask what disruption would look like and provide some examples of directions and companies that exemplify what are, to my mind, these sorts of disruptive technologies and approaches. With, I might add, the complete and utter knowledge that I’m wrong about who and what specifically will be disruptive! But in any case, before we can identify disruption, it’s worthwhile to ask what are the key elements of biopharma drug development that serve as real bottlenecks to affecting  human health, since these are the elements most likely to provide an avenue for disruption. Continue reading →