More Pricing Transparency Today: UCB 2023 Numbers Show Record-High Discounts

I mentioned yesterday that Merck had dropped its annual drug-price transparency report, warning that Merck’s numbers probably shouldn’t be extrapolated to the broader industry. After all, most companies don’t have mammoth $25 billion cancer drugs with limited rebates in their portfolio. 

And right after I hit send, a reader mentioned that -- hey! -- UCB also pushed out their pricing transparency numbers. Sure enough, they don’t look like Merck’s. Here are the key stats for UCB:

• List prices: Up 5.7%

• Net prices: Up 1.3%

• Average discount: 51.5%

UCB is mostly playing in the more-rebated anti-inflammatory space, so large discount numbers probably aren’t surprising. But it is worth noting that the 51.5% number is the largest figure UCB has ever reported (their numbers go back to 2018), spotlighting the reality that rebates are only going one direction. 

The UCB disclosures come as a part of the company’s Integrated Annual Report, and it includes several other pricing/access metrics and discussion, including the company’s ambition to secure 90% coverage, the size of patient assistance programs, and additional details on price increases.

I read a little bit of this BMJ paper arguing that oncology medicines are overpriced when I got to a section -- augmented with lots of pretty graphs -- that suggested that companies generally made back their money on oncology meds within three years. 

So I checked their sourcing, and the estimate for how much money it takes to bring an oncology product to market is based on this paper by Prasad and Mailankody. I’m bringing the topic up because that’s a paper that prompted journalist Matt Herper, then at Forbes, to write a whole article about how “insanely bad” that work was. 

So yes: this whole writeup is just an excuse to link back to the Herper piece. And to suggest that anyone who cites that Prasad and Mailankody paper probably has an ax to grind. 

• This new paper seeks to estimate the rebates on GLP-1-based meds for obesity and diabetes, pegging the average obesity discount at 41% and the average diabetes discount at 54% to 59%. Those numbers are not particularly different from AEI estimates from last year. While these figures are moving targets -- I’d be shocked if discounts weren’t getting bigger -- they’re helpful reminders that the list price of these medicines bears very little relation to their net prices. 

• Mark Cuban is going to a White House “listening session” on PBMs, and I am HERE FOR IT. 

• This is a great little wrap-up from Axios on how Mitch McConnell’s would-be successors think about the pharma industry and health care. It’s probably over-thinking it to imagine that they’ll be change agents for biopharma, but it sounds like all of them will bring at least some knowledge to the table. Axios noted that John Thune has some 340B and PBM experience and that John Cornyn has been all over patent topics. 

• Speaking of great wrap-ups, I really enjoyed this NORD overview of its legislative priorities in light of the House subcommittee Rare Disease Day hearing. 

• I have to confess that state-level regulation of 340B, particularly laws shielding contract pharmacies from manufacturer intervention, is something that I don’t watch as closely as I should. So I’m super-grateful for this Bloomberg Law story that summarizes the legal and legislative state of play so well. 

• We don’t talk often enough about what we need to do to incentivize vaccine innovation, which makes this International Business Times op-ed -- by BIO’s David Thomas -- worth the read.