Dr Joseph Fuhr: Biosimilars Bring on Brand-to-Brand Competition

Transcript (slightly modified)

How will biosimilars impact our healthcare industry?

One of the issues about biosimilars is that they’re taking away the monopoly of a biologic. Now, there is a lot of money that is spent in terms of biologics and in terms of research and development. So they need to get a fair return on their investment. So what we have here is the issue of allowing for innovation, which then will increase consumer welfare—people benefit from these drugs—and at the same time allow for access to consumers but also allow for innovation of new drugs that will benefit society. One of the things that we see that is different from the generic market in the biosimilar market is that many of the brand-name companies are actually getting into the biosimilar market, so we’ll see competition more like brand-to-brand than we see brand-to-generic.