Perspectives: Lawmakers Ignore Harsh Realities Of Drug Development In Favor Of Simplicity And Sloganeering

Stat: Drug Pricing Conversations Must Include The Cost Of Innovation
Midterm elections have ushered in a decidedly split 116th Congress. Yet the desire to lower U.S. pharmaceutical spending, which now exceeds $450 billion a year and dwarfs that of any other developed nation, is likely to continue uniting some strange bedfellows. Lawmakers from both side of the aisle are doing a disservice to Americans by uniting behind populist drug pricing proposals that ignore the harsh realities of drug development in favor of simplicity and sloganeering. Consider the unlikely coalition of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), and President Donald Trump calling to tie U.S. drug prices to those of our international peers. (Craig Garthwaite and Benedic Ippolito, 1/11)

The Wall Street Journal: Big Pharma’s Cancer Race 
Not long ago America’s political class was fretting about too many “me-too” drugs. Eli Lilly ’s bid for Loxo Oncology , which follows a flurry of biotech deals, shows how the pharmaceutical landscape is fast-evolving as U.S. drug companies compete to become leaders in oncology. Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly on Monday announced plans to purchase the Stamford, Conn., start-up Loxo for $8 billion with the goal of expanding its oncology portfolio. Loxo has pioneered an experimental therapy targeting single-gene abnormalities that can cause tumors throughout the body. Most cancer treatments target specific body sites, so Loxo’s innovation may be revolutionary. (1/9)

US News & World Report: The Need To Drive Down Prescription Drug Prices
A 2018 poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 80 percent of Americans thought prescription costs were unreasonable, and the high costs have been found to cause patients to alter the way they take their medication, or to not take it at all. The same KFF poll found that 40 percent of people under the age of 65 cut pills in half or skipped doses due to the costs, while 54 percent did not fill a medication at all because of the cost. These statistics do not even include the Medicare population age 65 and older that is living longer than ever before and need these life-saving medications. (Eddie Fatakhov, 1/15)

The Baltimore Sun: Can Big Pharma Keep Getting Away With Price Gouging? Not If Elijah Cummings Has Anything To Say About It
Know why big pharmaceutical companies in the United States raise the prices of some prescription drugs to outrageous levels? Because they can. There are few obstacles to jacking up prices so the companies that sell brand-name drugs — and spend millions to advertise them ad nauseam — do pretty much what they please, and shamelessly. In the midst of a real national crisis — unlike the Trump administration’s fake national crisis at the southwestern border — with nearly 50,000 opioid-related overdose deaths in 2017 and likely even more in 2018, the Virginia-based company that manufactures an overdose-reversal drug increased the price of its antidote by 600 percent. The people running that company must have been inoculated against shame. (Dan Rodricks, 1/15)

The Washington Post: What Happened When Biotech Startup Pursued A New Treatment For Pancreatic Cancer.
Two years ago, as a Harvard undergraduate, I started a biotech company with a fellow student to develop an experimental drug for pancreatic cancer. As biology majors, we had read a paper by a Harvard Medical School professor about an intriguing experiment and hoped we had found a possible solution to one of the world’s most lethal diseases. Rather than try to kill pancreatic tumors directly, we would block a cellular system called Hippo-YAP, which shields cancer from existing cancer-killing drugs. According to the paper, drugs that had been ineffective successfully destroyed pancreatic tumors in mice after Hippo-YAP was inactivated. (Nathaniel Brooks Horwitz, 1/12)

Stat: Virtual Repurposing Can Help Discover New Uses For Existing Drugs
The process for discovering drugs tends to be based on the same kind of pigeonholing that doctors use to treat disease: Parkinson’s is one disease, Crohn’s is something completely separate. A new approach, sometimes called virtual repurposing, offers a way to discover unknown connections between “unconnected” diseases that may lead to new treatments. (Inga Peter, 1/11)