CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — We live in an age of miracles, but they come at a high cost, with new gene therapies costing millions of dollars each. Can we afford them? STAT senior writer Adam Feuerstein sat down with three industry CEOs to discuss this and other questions during a session called ‘The State of Biotech” at the inaugural STAT summit in Cambridge this week.
Dr. Athena Countouriotis, the president and chief executive officer of Turning Point Therapeutics, spoke about the price Roche set for a lung cancer drug, Rozlytrek. The drug currently costs about $17,050 per month; an earlier drug cost $15,000, while one competing drug, Vitrakvi, costs about twice as much.
“Many people thought, well, if it’s really innovative and very different, they could definitely [put a] premium price on that. So I give Roche a little bit of credit,” she said.
Jeff Jonas, CEO of Sage Therapeutics, was also emphatic that strict drug pricing policies could make the broader biopharma industry will suffer — and that drafting regulations based on “bad actors who we haven’t called out” could be an overreaction.
Watch the full discussion below.
