Dr Gillian Woollett Highlights International Markets With Successful Biosimilar Adoption

Gillian Woollett, MA, Dphil, vice president and head of regulatory strategy and policy at Samsung Bioepis, gives insight into what international markets the United States could look to as examples of good biosimilar adoption at the Festival of Biologics 2022 meeting in San Diego, California.

Transcript

Besides Europe, what other markets should the US look to as examples of good biosimilar adoption?

Well, Canada came up a little bit on the adoption because they've been most proactive on ideas around switching. So, the issues on switching of patients, whether they're on the originator or on another biosimilar, were discussed, and I don't think anybody really had a basis for clinical concerns given all the data that's accruing. But there's definitely an expectation that switching from [the] reference to biosimilar is somehow different than between biosimilars even though all of them would be under the auspices of a physician's prescription given that, basically, we haven't had [much experience with] interchangeables yet, at any level, even in the United States, and we don't have interchangeables anywhere else in the world. There was actually a presentation from Denmark that also gave a lot of their experience. So, that's useful; they've been actively switching.