ICER sees substantial leap in cost-effectiveness of AbbVie's Rinvoq, says GlobalData

Following the surprise withdrawal of US health technology assessor, the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review’s (ICER) initial draft evidence report last month, the organization’s latest draft, published October 11, has seen AbbVie’s (NYSE: ABBV) Rinvoq (upadacitinib) make a substantial leap in cost-effectiveness, commented industry analytics firm GlobalData’s senior immunology analyst Rose Joachim.

Where once it exceeded even the highest commonly cited thresholds of incremental cost-utility ratios, in comparison to AbbVie's Humira (adalimumab), it now falls below the majority of them.

“This shift in the drug’s cost-benefit profile is due to key changes in the way ICER designed its model. One of the biggest changes was the way in which second and later lines of therapy were modeled following a first-line JAK inhibitor failure. In the document’s previous iteration, the second line of therapy was assumed to be palliative care, which was also taken to have no cost. ICER noted that this did not reflect real-world practice, as patients typically continue to cycle through other treatments following failure of a first line agent and stated this was a major limitation of the initial analysis,” said Ms Joachim.