GSK agrees price deal for meningitis B vaccine to the UK's NHS

Following massive consumer campaigns and huge media coverage of the lack of availability for children’s access to meningitis B vaccine because of cost (The Pharma Letter March 23), the UK Department of Health and British pharma major GlaxoSmithKline (LSE: GSK) have reached agreement on an acceptable price for the company’s Bexsero.

GSK only recently acquired rights to Bexsero, a meningococcal serogroup B vaccine, as part of a three-part swap agreement with Swiss pharma giant Novartis (NOVN: VX), and, reportedly, Novartis had been inflexible on price that, according to media reports was about £75 ($112) per dose, while UK DoH advisors believed that something around £5-£7 was an acceptable price. The agreed price has not been disclosed, but media reports suggest that this is around £20 per dose.

UK Health Minister Jeremy Hunt announced the deal on Sunday, which he said would make Britain the first country in the world to have a nationwide vaccination program for the potentially deadly childhood disease, but regretted the deal had taken more than a year to negotiate. He said the Department of Health will now work with GSK to secure supplies of the vaccine and bring it into the national immunisation programme, likely to be from September this year.