Terrill Jordan: The Promise, and the Reality, of Biosimilars

Transcript

Biosimilars, you know, there's a lot of promise there. What we found at [Regional Cancer Care Associates, RCCA] when we looked at biosimilars is that the promise was probably more than what we'll actually see in practice. Biosimilars that take a lot of money to develop, at the end of the day, they're in the same place, many times, as the reference drug, maybe 15% to 20% cheaper.

So it's not the move you would expect from a value-based standpoint. So what I really expect we’ll see is that pricing will stabilize when you have a biosimilar because it will introduce competition, but I don't expect we'll see significant price decreases. These are not generics. So [with] a generic, the price will drop precipitously. We're not going to see that. We’ll see stabilization of price because of the competition. The more biosimilars in a particular category, the more, I think, stabilization you'll see.

So I think that's what we'll see. From our perspective, I actually just talked about our chairman this morning, and one of the things that we're looking at is, you know, how can we kind of push the value out of it? And that will be the piece that we’ll continue to kind of struggle with: how do we pull value out of that, instead of just price stability?