Price controls proposed in the Build Back Better Act

Consultancy Vital Transformation has published  new research showing that the Build Back Better Act (BBBA) will have a negative impact on patient access to new therapies as funding would be severely curtailed for R&D.

The Biden administration's BBBA aims to allow the US government to negotiate pricing under a set framework of reductions based upon the amount of time a drug has spent on the market.

Duane Schulthess, chief executive of Vital Transformation, said: "As global firms increasingly use their free cash flows to support a large, flourishing external ecosystem of investments and partnerships in addition to their own internal R&D activities, net earnings reductions of this magnitude - essentially cut to zero in a quarter of the firms we studied - would substantially reduce the money needed for R&D partnerships with small biotech and pipeline investments into drug discovery and development."