Strategies to avoid innovation/market access trade-off

In an expert view piece, Ramon Mohanlal, chief medical officer at BeyondSpring, a USA-based clinical stage biopharma company, tackles the issue which threatens to undermine the entire drugmaking cycle.

The pricing of pharmaceutical products needs to take into account the interest of patients, physicians, pharma co-economic evaluations, managed care organizations, pharmacy benefit managers and national governments – all the while ensuring adequate returns for the pharmaceutical company involved.

As is the case with all industry sectors, both price and volume are important considerations to maximize revenues and profits for pharma companies. The current trend with pharmaceutical pricing is to focus on obtaining the highest possible price as opposed to the highest possible volume with, in some cases, price increases being introduced for products that have been on the market for extended periods, such as the recent EpiPen example.