Biosimilars

Scott Soefje, PharmD, director of pharmacy cancer care at Mayo Clinic, explains how education can help with biosimilar adoption and how an updated biosimilar workflow has simplified the prior authorization process.

The Act4Biosimilars Action Plan seeks to increase biosimilar adoption by at least 30 percentage points in 30-plus countries by 2030.

Biosimilars are starting to make a significant impact in overall drug spending, which is what they are designed to do, said Scott Soefje, PharmD, director of pharmacy cancer care at Mayo Clinic.

The pharmacy benefit manager SmithRx has announced that through a partnership with the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, it will offer Yusimry, an adalimumab biosimilar, for less than 90% of the cost of the reference product, Humira.

The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, an online pharmacy dedicated to increasing access to lower-cost prescriptions, is partnering with Coherus Biosciences to distribute Yusimry, a biosimilar referencing Humira. It’s the first time the pharmacy has added a biosimilar to its list of drugs.

When multiple trastuzumab biosimilars entered the US market in quick succession, they were able to do something other biosimilars have not in the United States: drive down the cost of the originator biologic.

Abstracts presented at EULAR 2023 highlighted the impact that a mandatory switching policy had on biosimilar uptake in British Columbia, Canada, and the lack of uptake when no such policy was in place in the United States.

New research has found the 340B program is slowing uptake of biosimilars by incentivizing use of more expensive biologics.

The 2023 Asembia Specialty Pharmacy Summit took place in early May in Las Vegas, Nevada, and The American Journal of Managed Care® was there to cover the meeting—catch up on what you may have missed.

The FDA approved Celltrion Healthcare’s Yuflyma (adalimumab-aaty), which is a high-concentration, citrate-free formulation.

Previous studies have found modest uptake of biosimilars in both commercial and Medicare populations. This study finds that the uptake varies between the rural and urban provider settings.

Amneal Pharmaceuticals this week launched its pegfilgrastim biosimilar, Fylnetra (pegfilgrastim-pbbk), for the treatment and prevention of febrile neutropenia, making it the sixth biosimilar referencing Neulasta to enter the US market.

At the Pharmacy Quality Alliance (PQA) 2023 Annual Meeting, a patient joined a panel to give insight into the challenges of living with a chronic illness and what he sees as the pros and cons of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

The results indicate that the program could play a role in discouraging use of biosimilars in the United States.

Fran Gregory, PharmD, vice president of emerging therapies at Cardinal Health, discusses the role the new wave of biosimilars will have on rebate practices for both pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and payers.

A review article investigating the use of bevacizumab biosimilars found that despite lingering concerns about their usage for extrapolated indications, bevacizumab biosimilars are regularly used in metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) even though clinical tests only evaluate them in patients with lung cancer.

Oncology has been an easy area for employers to adopt biosimilars because of the rising costs in the space, said Margaret Rehayem, vice president, National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions. Now that multiple adalimumab (Humira) biosimilars are hitting the US market, employers should take a step back to review their current strategy around the drug.

These factors could provide a scientific basis for consistency evaluations of the quality and efficacy of insulin biosimilars, study authors wrote.

Rebates remain very attractive for many employers, but they should push back on the reliance on rebates that may be preventing biosimilars from being added to formularies, said Margaret Rehayem, vice president, National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions.

A study assessing factors that may determine a commercial health plan’s likelihood of covering a biosimilar found that biosimilars that are cancer therapies, used to treat children, indicated for highly prevalent conditions, or only competing against the originator were more likely to have coverage restrictions.

While employers fall on a spectrum when it comes to knowledge and understanding of biosimilars, there does remain a need to educate them, as well as for them to educate their employees, said Margaret Rehayem, vice president, National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions.

The Employer Playbook on Biosimilars highlights strategies employers can use to navigate challenges around ensuring employee access to biosimilars at the pharmacy, as well as how to respond to pharmacy benefit managers who aren’t making biosimilars available on the formulary, said Margaret Rehayem, vice president, National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions.

Kathy Oubre, MS, CEO of Pontchartrain Cancer Center, discusses the use of biosimilars and how pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) as well as payers have challenged the biosimilar market.

A new report from AHIP indicates that biosimilars have the potential to garner savings of $180 billion over 5 years, but there needs to be a review of the approval process for interchangeability to encourage more approvals.

With the global market for biologics estimated at $382 billion just last year, and a projected global drug spend of close to $1.5 trillion by 2027, the landscape is ripe for biosimilars to help decrease the health care system’s cost burden.

The province of Newfoundland and Labrador and the territory of Yukon both announced biosimilar switching policies, bringing Canada to a total of 10 out of 13 jurisdictions have a policy in place.

Two posters presented at the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD) annual meeting evaluated misconceptions and addressed concerns around the use of biosimilars in dermatology.

Both the high-concentration and low-concentration versions of adalimumab-adaz (Hyrimoz) injection will launch in July, along with a wave of other biosimilars to Humira (reference adalimumab).

Biosimilars may not be perfect, but they are, at the very minimum, helping to make cancer therapies a little bit more accessible, said Andre D. Harvin, PharmD, MS, executive director of pharmacy, oncology, Cone Health.

With the rapid decline in average sales price of reference pegfilgrastim products due to biosimilar competition, health care institutions and payers may grapple with coverage of Neulasta Onpro.