Steven D'Amato, RPh: Adoption of Biosimilars

Transcript:

Do you see biosimilars being used more in the future?

The use of biosimilars coming to the market will be challenging. As you know, biosimilars take a lot of research and development to develop the biosimilar, so the cost savings are probably not going to be as dramatic as some people may expect. I think biosimilars will have a challenge when going up against the branded product. The reason I say that is, number 1, they’ll have to be, certainly, price-advantaged to switch to a biosimilar from a branded product, but there are other things that go into product delivery, and that can be patient assistance programs. I believe that biosimilars will have to have the same programs in place as the brands do for people to embrace their products and bring them on board.

I would say that certainly the clinical data that we’ll review will solidify our use of the biosimilars—I think they’ll be used—[but] I think there’s going to be a price break point that we [will] need to achieve widespread adoption of biosimilars. I think you’re going to need to have really significant cost reductions for practices to switch to biosimilars, and we’ll have to see where that goes.