Lee Schwartzberg, MD, FACP: Biosimilars and Neutropenia

Lee Schwartzberg, MD, FACP, medical director and senior partner at The West Clinic, discusses his research that showed that the incidence of febrile neutropenia was similar between patients who received reference filgrastim versus those who received a biosimilar.

Transcript

Biosimilars are a way of life now; they’ve come on strong and we started with the supportive care drugs, particularly the growth factors. Physicians have to get comfortable that a biosimilar will deliver the same value, the same kind of response, that any other treatment, the originator drug, did. This was one attempt to show that a biosimilar filgrastim gave the exact same results as the originator filgrastim, so that gives comfort to oncologists that they can use a lower-price alternative that has all of the efficacy and all of the safety of the originator product.