Maker of $60K a year M.S. drug, Copaxone, fighting approval of a less costly generic version.
In an upcoming Supreme Court case, Teva is appealing a ruling that invalidated a patent that would have protected Copaxone from generic competition for another year and a half.
This is why health insurers, both private and state, have drug formularies. Otherwise, the drug companies have one rule for setting prices: what the market will bear. And in the case of a terrible disease, the market will bear a lot.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/business/supreme-court-to-hear-appeal-of-multiple-sclerosis-drug-case.html
Teva, based in Israel, is desperate to stave off generic competition to Copaxone, which had global sales last year of $4.3 billion; $3.2 billion of that figure came from the United States. The drug, which has been on the market for 17 years and is the best-selling treatment for M.S., accounts for about 20 percent of Teva’s revenue and about half its profit.
But a generic version of Copaxone could provide needed cost relief to the health care system. The list prices of Copaxone and other older M.S. drugs have roughly quadrupled over the last decade, to about $60,000 a year.
“The prices would go up 10, 20, 30 percent at a time for no apparent reason,” said Dr. John R. Corboy, co-director of the Rocky Mountain Multiple Sclerosis Center at the University of Colorado. “We spend a quarter, some days half our time talking to patients about insurance and figuring out how we are going to get them medications.”
At the same time, Teva has been frantically trying to convert patients to a new, more concentrated form of Copaxone that requires patients to inject themselves only three times a week instead of every day. That new form would not be subject to generic competition. Once patients convert, it would be harder for insurers to force them to use a generic that would require them to go back to daily injections.
SNIP