Chinese PD-1s secure broad reimbursement, but at what cost?

China's National Health Security Administration (NHSA) has announced the annual results from the National Reimbursement Drug List (NRDL) negotiations in 2020, according to a client noted from SVB Leerink Research analyst Andrew Berens.

This list designates medicines that will be reimbursed by state-sponsored insurance plans. The negotiations contemplated 162 total drugs, with 119 new drugs being added to the updated list. While detailed pricing was not made available for all the drugs, high level numbers suggest an average price cut of ~50.64% versus other regions for the newly-added 119 drugs.

Importantly, all China domestic programmed death-1 (PD-1s) were included in the list, including BeiGene's (Nasdaq: BGNE) tislelizumab in classical Hodgkin’s lymphoma (cHL) and bladder cancer, Junshi Bioscience's (HKEX: 1877) Tuoyi (toripalimab) in melanoma, Hengrui's AiRuiKa (camrelizumab) in cHL, liver cancer, esophageal cancer and non-small cell ng cancer (NSCLC).