Relief Therapeutics Holding AG (RLFTF)

[changes_iv]

A clinical trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health found that the drug shortens recovery times for many Covid-19 patients. However, remdesivir has not yet been proven to reduce mortality—to save lives. While the NIH trial found a numerical improvement in survival, the difference did not reach conventional thresholds of statistical significance or certainty; and a smaller study published in the Lancet also did not find an improvement in mortality. If remdesivir does not offer a mortality benefit, then the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review—an independent drug-pricing watchdog—puts the “value-based price benchmark” for the drug at $310 per treatment course. That’s about one-tenth its current price. Even if a mortality benefit from remdesivir were eventually confirmed, ICER pegs its value-based price at $2,500 to $2,800 per course, still 10 to 20 percent lower than what we pay right now.
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What about the cost of investment—does Gilead need to charge $3,120 for remdesivir to make up for all the time and money that the firm put into it? Even if it were appropriate to set a price based on a sunk cost—and most economists would argue that it’s not—remdesivir’s development has been buoyed by incredible amounts of government investment. The 2015 paper detailing the discovery of remdesivir was the product of a public-private partnership between scientists from Gilead, the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and the US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention; yet government employees were excluded from the molecule’s patent. Financially, remdesivir’s development has been directly supported by at least $70 million of taxpayer money—including funding for its initial discovery, studies of its effects on coronaviruses, and its Covid-19 clinical trials. Investment in remdesivir hasn’t been Gilead’s alone, and the drug’s price should accordingly reflect the contributions of taxpayer funds that offset the costs of its development and commercialization.~Wired
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