Dr Hope Rugo: Will Herceptin Become a Non-Preferred Drug?

Hope Rugo, MD, director of the breast oncology clinical trials program at the University of California at San Francisco, discusses how payers might address Herceptin after the advent of biosimilar trastuzumab.

Transcript:

Humana recently reclassified Herceptin from a preferred drug to a non-preferred drug in some Florida markets. Have you heard of this happening elsewhere?

I haven’t heard of a reclassification to a non-preferred drug. I think that they’re doing that ahead of time in preparation for the biosimilar availability in the next year. I’m guessing that that will happen wholesale, that every regulatory group and mass insurer will change to say trastuzumab is what is preferred, and the type of trastuzumab doesn’t matter.