GoodRx Proves The Value of GoodPR

I guess it’s not particularly a surprise -- Lilly toplined the news earlier this year -- but the data yesterday on donanemab for Alzheimer’s disease make the second-most-interesting therapeutic area in drug pricing that much more interesting.

I’m not remotely qualified to compare donanemab to Leqembi on safety or efficacy, but having two molecules in the market, as soon as the end the year, means that we’re going to have some great discussions about what patients value, how to account for adverse events, and what kind of budget impact this will all have. I’m here for it.

(Somewhat related: the question of quantifying patient benefit has always been an issue when talking about anti-amyloid therapies because the usual metrics aren’t easy to understand. So I thought that Lilly’s exploratory analysis that looked at the percentage of patients who didn’t progress at all was low-key genius. Adam Feuerstein does a good job of reviewing that data in his piece.)

Over the weekend, I wrote on LinkedIn about Prime Therapeutics PR coup -- getting Reuters to run its self-serving “analysis” of obesity meds as an exclusive.

But it turns out Prime wasn’t the only one who used smart comms to make waves last week.

GoodRx got a ton of GoodPress for its deal with Caremark, which allows beneficiaries covered by CVS’ PBM to have automatic access to GoodRx prices -- in addition to Caremark’s negotiated rates.

It’s a development worthy of attention, and if you want the background on how GoodRx and PBMs win through this kind of collaboration, Adam Fein dealt with the issue elegantly last November.

And people treated it like a big deal. There was coverage everwhere from Yahoo to Fierce to Forbes, and GoodRx shares jumped about 40% last week, driven by the news.

But here’s what caught my eye: it’s basically the same deal as GoodRx struck with Express Scripts last fall, which generated essentially zero coverage (beyond Adam’s aforementioned blog post) and had essentially zero impact on the company’s share price.

So what was the difference between the much-celebrated, stock-juicing Caremark deal and the dud of an Express Scripts collaboration? Public relations. The Caremark-GoodRx tie up got the press release treatment, and it sure looked like there was some coordinated media pitching.

In contrast, the Express Scripts deal was mentioned, almost in passing, during GoodRx’s third-quarter earnings call (the agreement didn’t even make the quarterly numbers press release).

The upshot: the press release isn’t dead, and no matter how dense the information superhighway is nowadays, old-fashioned communications can still make a difference. And if you don’t believe me, ask all of the GoodRx shareholders who are 40% richer today than they were a week ago.

• I feel like there is a chaos-theory element to the IRA. Small decisions in one part of the system have the possibility of wrecking havoc somewhere else, and it’s hard to know which decisions are going to have outsized impact. So I’m interested in deep looks at some of those small decisions and found this morning’s Health Affairs Forefront piece on the selection of “therapeutic alternatives” to be a worthwhile read. The short version is that CMS intends to consider only in-class competitors as alternatives, which, the authors argue, is too limited a frame.

• I really enjoyed this analysis of the generic insulin market by the Biosimilars Council, which highlights what’s really going on with scripts. It looks like docs are writing scripts for the low-cost, unbranded version of Lantus, but the ability of PBMs to block reimbursement means that 80% of those scripts go unfilled.

• Sanofi and AstraZeneca won FDA approval for their preventive treatment for RSV in infants. Clearance of the therapy, Beyfortus, is a big deal from a public health standpoint, but the companies didn’t answer the no. 1 question I have whenever a new med gets approved: what will it cost?

• Really curious what the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste is up to with their full-court press in support of PBMs. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that the group is spending cash on ads, but -- per STAT -- they also dropped a cool million on lobbying last quarter, which is a lot for a group that spent $50,000 during the same period a year earlier.

• The Harvard PORTAL folks have a new paper in Nature (funded by Arnold Ventures, natch) that looks at patent term extensions, finding that the tool is being used less and less, probably because other lifecycle-extension strategies work better. There’s a nice plain-language summary on LinkedIn.

• Colombia is considering issuing a compulsory license for ViiV’s dolutegravir-based HIV medicines. ViiV already has a licensing deal with the Medicines Patent Pool, but Colombia isn’t a part of that agreement. The company told STAT that they’re talking to the Colombia government, but didn’t provide details.