drug pricing
Genentech weighs slow-walking cancer drug after drug pricing reform
Photo credit: Genentech
I've been speaking with pharmaceutical industry executives about their perspectives on how the Inflation Reduction Act's drug pricing reform is playing out in the real world, and my latest installment this morning is a conversation with Genentech CEO Alexander Hardy.
He discusses a stark reality the company faces in developing an oral cancer therapy — that even though the drug could be developed faster to treat ovarian cancer, it would be more profitable to delay that testing and wait to put it on the market until it could be tested for prostate cancer, which has a bigger patient population. That slow walking, though, could lead to years of delays for patients with a deadly disease.
Read the full Q&A here, including four other issues he's pushing regulators and lawmakers to change about the drug pricing law.
public health
A CDC leadership overhaul
The new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mandy Cohen, hasn't been in place for long, but she is already overhauling the leadership of the CDC center that led the agency's Covid-19 response, my colleague Helen Branswell scooped.
Demetre Daskalakis, who has spent the past year in Washington as deputy director of the White House's national mpox response team, is headed back to CDC to become acting director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, Cohen told staff in an announcement.
José Romero, who headed the center for the past 14 months, will be leaving the CDC at the end of August. Read more, including moves for two other high-ranking officials.
personnel
Drug price negotiation advisers depart
This year, Medicare brought on two advisers to help implement its new drug price negotiation program — but they've already departed their roles, according to HHS' employee directory.
Rena Conti, a health economist and associate professor at Boston University and Joey Mattingly, an associate professor at the University of Utah, had been listed as advisers to Medicare's new negotiation group, but the listings disappeared. Mattingly said the role was "short-term" and "unpaid" to help the early phases of implementation.
"I just served as an expert they could call on from time to time. I'm no longer working with the team, but am happy to do so again if they need me," Mattingly told STAT.
Medicare got $3 billion to implement the program, and has so far employed 16 out of the 95 people that officials estimated they would hire for the negotiation and inflation rebate division. Some employees working on implementation are detailed from other divisions of CMS, including its acting director.
oversight
Senators sic the IRS on not-for-profit hospitals
A bipartisan group of influential senators has asked the IRS to probe whether not-for-profit hospitals are complying with community benefit requirements, my co-author Sarah Owermohle scooped.
The heart of the matter is whether not-for-profit health systems are doing enough to justify their tax-exempt status. Advocates have argued that the IRS' definition of what counts as a community benefit is too broad.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sent the letters. Read more about a harbinger of a policy debate that is heating up on Capitol Hill.
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