Gillian Woollett Speaks on Where Biosimilar Conversations Need to Go Moving Forward

Although a lot of discussion regarding biosimilars has focussed on patient access, we need to divert more attention to the reliability of companies making biosimilar products, said Gillian Woollett, MA, DPhil, vice president and head of regulatory strategy and policy at Samsung Bioepis.

Transcript

What types of conversations regarding biosimilars do we need to be have more of?

Woollett: Patient access, we've heard a lot about. The other thing that we'd heard less about probably is the issues around surety of supply, which you get through having multiple manufacturers. But it's also an issue where you need to know that the companies sponsoring the products are reliable. And that's where I'd put one pitch in for Samsung Bioepis as if you've done the science right from the beginning, then everything else is an opportunity. And if you've got state of the art manufacturing. So, an issue that came out of COVID-19, of course, is reliability of the drug supply. And so you need to have capacity and you need it to be reliable.