Julie Reed Explains How Biosimilars Can Help Promote Health Care Innovation

Savings generated from biosimilar utilization could be used to promote innovation for new therapies or funding for more health care services, said Julie M. Reed, the executive director of the Biosimilars Forum.

Transcript

Besides savings, what other benefits can increased biosimilar utilization provide?

If you think about how costly these are. We're aware [that these could cost] tens of thousands of dollars and some monthly. So, if a patient is paying out of pocket for their co-pay or anything like that, that's really big. Think about it just on a daily basis, especially with today's inflation and everything else, how concerning it is for patients who may not have insurance, they may not have any access to these products.

We're working with provider groups to help improve health equities, and if you think about health equity and equity just to care and services and medicines, biosimilars are a key piece, just like generic drugs. If we didn't have lower-cost biosimilars on the market, patients may not have any access to these medicines, and that's a very, very difficult choice. So, that access, that whole promise that lowering cost leads to greater access and more patients can have these products.

The other piece is on the innovation side. And this is what we see in other countries, in Canada and in the United Kingdom, where the government and the stakeholders have the savings. So, they have savings, and they can take that money and invest it in new innovative therapies that they perhaps could not have afforded or given access to patients to before. Or in some countries, they’re investing all the savings into services they didn’t have before. So, they’re investing into education or more nurses or things like that. That’s the thing, [saying] like, “Wait, guys, you’ve got an opportunity to increase your budget for something else because you're saving on this side.” So, it’s key, it’s sort of a win-win for biosimilars, for patients, for health care providers. It’s also a win for innovators who are bringing out new innovative therapies that may have limited access because of cost. That I think is key and free market competition is is really the best policy, especially here in the US.

I mean, think about it, we’re developing gene therapies and all these things in rare disease therapies that have never been developed before and how are we going to pay for it? Well, you know what, let’s lower the cost on ones with biosimilars so we can pay for those new things. That’s an incredible opportunity we have. But it won’t just happen; we have to make it happen.