Hans-Christian Kolberg, MD: The Importance of Reporting Data on Biosimilar Trastuzumab

Transcript

I think it is very important to keep reporting these things because, even for people doing oncology for years and decades, it’s still very difficult to really differentiate between a generic medication and a biosimilar. A generic is simply like cooking the same recipe, and developing a biosimilar is completely different. It’s really developing a new medication; you just do it the other way around. It is reverse-engineering because you have to find out what the original company was doing.

The effect regarding healthcare economics is that, of course, you can sell that cheaper because developing a new antibody is an investment of more than $1 billion usually, whereas developing a biosimilar for a known antibody costs about $200 million dollars.

So actually the prices in the end are cheaper, which is of course important in countries like the United States or in Germany, where I work, because we save money we can use for other things in the healthcare system. But it's even more important in places where giving a patient an antibody is not a question because there's no money for that. Like in the developing countries. For those, biosimilars may be a huge chance to gain access to antibodies at all.