Aurinia Pharmaceuticals Inc (AUPH)

[moosedogger]

Somer, the STAT ICER article was excellent

Thanks for posting the link to it:

https://www.statnews.com/2019/11/14/working-with-icer-or-around-it-on-cost-effectiveness-estimates/

Very revealing re what they're all about.

Really liked the author's conclusion of that piece:

As Patricia Goldsmith and Carole Florman of CancerCare recently pointed out in STAT, ICER’s latest framework “will continue to exclude disease-specific experts, patients, and caregivers from voting panels; and will maintain review schedules that signal a greater commitment to speed than accuracy.”

I believe that ICER poses a threat to patient access to new therapies. Its cost-effectiveness determinations have been so reliably friendly to insurers that CVS announced late last year a plan that would allow its pharmacy benefit manager, Caremark, to refuse to cover drugs that don’t pass ICER review. That’s a terrifying proposition for drug makers that have invested more than a decade of research and billions of dollars to earn FDA approval and bring products to market and the patients who are desperate to access those treatments.

It will be very interesting to see the final draft of this report on March 26th.

The current draft of this ICER report emphatically sacrifices accuracy over speed in spades.

So far PG and the team at Aurinia deserve very high marks for their ability to navigate the clearly treacherous, ICER infested waters of drug pricing.