Earlier this week, we reported that The Seattle Times is investigating drug industry profiteering from orphan drugs. Now, the business news website Quartz has run its own the story on the topic.
“There’s good reason for big pharma’s attraction to rare disease treatments,” writer John McDuling says in Forget Viagra: Why Rare Diseases are Big Pharma’s Latest Obsession. “Revenue from these products has been outpacing sales of mainstream drugs for the last decade, a trend that’s expected to continue for the next 30 year.” McDuling goes on to observe that “drug companies can charge more for orphan drugs because usually there are few, if any, alternative treatments for rare diseases (which are often life threatening) to their product.”
As we noted in our Nov. 11 post, the drug industry is suing to take away all 340B discounts on orphan drugs from rural and cancer hospitals, claiming that the limited price reductions on orphan drugs now available to these hospitals are causing “severe and irreparable harm.”