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Drug company announces new version of insulin at half the price

JacksinPA

JacksinPA

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Drug company announces new version of insulin at half the price | TheHill

The drug company Eli Lilly on Monday announced that it is introducing a cheaper version of its insulin that will sell at half the price.

The move comes in response to intense scrutiny of drug prices and particularly insulin, a decades-old drug that people with diabetes need that has seen huge price spikes in recent years.
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Lilly for many years extracted insulin from pig pancreas, a messy & waste-intensive process. Despite being a very conservative company located in the heart of a very conservative state (IN), they were one of the first companies to switch to the use of genetic engineering to produce insulin by fermenting recombinant bacteria into which copes of the insulin genes had been spliced.

'In October 1982, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Eli Lilly and Company's Humulin, the first human insulin for diabetes treatment created using recombinant DNA technology. ... It was around the same time, luckily, that recombinant DNA technology or genetic engineering, became available.'
 
it's a smart move.
 
Helix said:
it's a smart move.
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Rich, successful company. I couldn't believe how their HQ in Indianoplace had grown since I first called ion them in the 70s. By 2000 I called it 'the house that Prozac built.'
 
JacksinPA said:
Rich, successful company. I couldn't believe how their HQ in Indianoplace had grown since I first called ion them in the 70s. By 2000 I called it 'the house that Prozac built.'
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it's a huge campus. i have been concerned about the insulin thing for a while, and they just did what i would recommend.
 
Helix said:
it's a huge campus. i have been concerned about the insulin thing for a while, and they just did what i would recommend.
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Don't care for Indianoplace. Got involved in a road rage incident on way from airport to hotel with some Jap clients. Other guy threatened me with his car. Called the cops: 45 minute wait! Also the 2 worse thunderstorms I've ever been in were in that city.
 
$137.35 per vial, I don't think it is time to start celebrating just yet.
That's still a far cry from what it cost back in 2001, 35 dollars a vial.
I could understand if it was fifty or sixty bucks a vial, but it's more than twice that.

The price for Humalog increased from $35 to $234 between 2001 and 2015, a 585% increase.

People can get Humalog in Canada for $32 Canadian. That means they're making money on that $30 vial of insulin, which in the U.S. at retail cost is nearly 10 times that price.

Far as I'm concerned, it's time for the street dope dealers to stop slinging crack and start slinging smuggled insulin from India and Canada.
That's what they finally had to do back in the days of The Dallas Buyers Club with AIDS drugs.
 
JacksinPA said:
Don't care for Indianoplace. Got involved in a road rage incident on way from airport to hotel with some Jap clients. Other guy threatened me with his car. Called the cops: 45 minute wait! Also the 2 worse thunderstorms I've ever been in were in that city.
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road rage is pretty common around here. i've had a few incidents. now i do my best not to look at anyone else in traffic. going to work super early and leaving early also helps a lot.

Indy isn't so bad as cities go. i probably would only visit very rarely if i didn't have to. however, my small hometown has about zero jobs for scientists, so Indy it is. it needs better public transportation, though.
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
$137.35 per vial, I don't think it is time to start celebrating just yet.
That's still a far cry from what it cost back in 2001, 35 dollars a vial.
I could understand if it was fifty or sixty bucks a vial, but it's more than twice that.

The price for Humalog increased from $35 to $234 between 2001 and 2015, a 585% increase.

People can get Humalog in Canada for $32 Canadian. That means they're making money on that $30 vial of insulin, which in the U.S. at retail cost is nearly 10 times that price.

Far as I'm concerned, it's time for the street dope dealers to stop slinging crack and start slinging smuggled insulin from India and Canada.
That's what they finally had to do back in the days of The Dallas Buyers Club with AIDS drugs.
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You have inherent logistics problems with insulin that you don't have with crack, H or weed. It has a finite shelf life & must be kept refrigerated. If you came on a lot of it that hadn't been inventoried at a pharmacy, you might not be able to tell if it was OK or not.
 
JacksinPA said:
You have inherent logistics problems with insulin that you don't have with crack, H or weed. It has a finite shelf life & must be kept refrigerated. If you came on a lot of it that hadn't been inventoried at a pharmacy, you might not be able to tell if it was OK or not.
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Fully aware of that, but I somehow suspect that if there was enough of a demand, people on the black market would find a way to work with it. I understand how insulin works.
The fact that Lilly thinks it is magnanimous about releasing a new insulin that is still almost five times the price it was in 2001 and is calling it a low priced alternative is absurd.

For the price of Humalog ($375/vial) we might as well just try to plow the sum total patients would spend at that rate (approx $38 billion) into genetic research which will someday enable humans to have a more robust pancreas, and into research that might enable a replacement pancreas to be grown.

Almost one hundred million Americans are dealing some kind of pre-diabetic or diabetic condition.
That's no longer a market, it's a crisis. We wiped out polio, maybe it is time to rethink diabetes as something that needs to be cured, not MANAGED, because "managing" this disease at such an obscene cost is like setting your houses on fire to keep the town warm.
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
Fully aware of that, but I somehow suspect that if there was enough of a demand, people on the black market would find a way to work with it. I understand how insulin works.
The fact that Lilly thinks it is magnanimous about releasing a new insulin that is still almost five times the price it was in 2001 and is calling it a low priced alternative is absurd.

For the price of Humalog ($375/vial) we might as well just try to plow the sum total patients would spend at that rate (approx $38 billion) into genetic research which will someday enable humans to have a more robust pancreas, and into research that might enable a replacement pancreas to be grown.

Almost one hundred million Americans are dealing some kind of pre-diabetic or diabetic condition.
That's no longer a market, it's a crisis. We wiped out polio, maybe it is time to rethink diabetes as something that needs to be cured, not MANAGED, because "managing" this disease at such an obscene cost is like setting your houses on fire to keep the town warm.
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LOL.

This isn’t ‘magnanimous’ for Lilly.

Everyone on this thread has missed what this is really about. It’s a shot across the bow to the PBMs and, to a lesser extent, insurance companies.

Drug pricing is incredibly Byzantine. I’d guess (because no one can ever really know- the info is proprietary), that the net price Lilly is getting for Humalog is *LESS* than the pricing for their generic.

The list price for the generic, of course, isn’t going to be the price announced- AWP is always 15% less by convention, and then rebates may lower costs as well.

But.. Lilly has just put a big hurt on the PBMs.... they were probably enjoying an 80% rebate on Humalog and they just got cut out.

So it’s a wash- or a bit of a loss- for Lilly, with a lot of great PR, and a way to hit the ball into The PBMs Court.

I can’t imagine how rough this is gonna be for the Lilly account executive that’s probably going to be called into the CVS/Caremark offices next week.



This *is* a pretty big deal, but not for the reasons you think. This could set off a wave of authorized generics, putting huge pressure on the PBMs, and, eventually, the insurance companies getting their services at a huge discount because they’re functionally subsidized by pharma.
 
Helix said:
it's a huge campus. i have been concerned about the insulin thing for a while, and they just did what i would recommend.
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Clever. Price goes up several times, people get pissed enough something will he done.

Cut grossly inflated price in half and claim magnanimity.

Everybody quiets down

Profits!
 
These kinds of things infuriate me.

On the one hand, it is very much true that the system of time-limited patents and price-setting is necessary to spur the development of new drugs, unless government really were to take over paying for drug trials ("ownership of the means of production" of one industry). I sort of have an inside view vicariously. My father was a university professor who also saw patients for free, my mother a PhD who worked in a lab developing various things, ie a surfactant that helped cure a fatal lung disease. But, they decided to raise a family and the jobs just didn't pay. So they went into the pharma industry: there, you could make a good living, and you could help many more people at once. Now, I'm not outing myself by identifying which drugs they developed, but they did develop drugs and some are on market and do in fact help people. There is an extremely legitimate side to the industry, something that gets papered over often enough in the media.

People just love their popular prejudices: oh, lawyers are evil, contractors are evil, pharma companies are evil. We love a good villain, eh?




That said and on the other hand, the dirty players in the pharma market disgust me. Something can and should be done about that. There is no rational argument for allowing price-games with necessary drugs to be played after the reasonable period of investment-recoupment is complete. Well, not unless one thinks the most important principle ever is letting companies do what they please because freedomz or something.

That "pharma bro" (I'm forgetting the name) should've been in jail for 30 years or something, though I doubt the statutes in question would have allowed it. I never checked. Bad players in the pharma industry....those are the evil ones. It's one things to play these games with smartphones or whatever, but with people's literal lives? To that I say: burn in hell, you soulless swine. (Ok, ok, fair point. Not soulless. If "soulless", then no hell, right?)
 
Mr Person said:
These kinds of things infuriate me.

On the one hand, it is very much true that the system of time-limited patents and price-setting is necessary to spur the development of new drugs, unless government really were to take over paying for drug trials ("ownership of the means of production" of one industry). I sort of have an inside view vicariously. My father was a university professor who also saw patients for free, my mother a PhD who worked in a lab developing various things, ie a surfactant that helped cure a fatal lung disease. But, they decided to raise a family and the jobs just didn't pay. So they went into the pharma industry: there, you could make a good living, and you could help many more people at once. Now, I'm not outing myself by identifying which drugs they developed, but they did develop drugs and some are on market and do in fact help people. There is an extremely legitimate side to the industry, something that gets papered over often enough in the media.

People just love their popular prejudices: oh, lawyers are evil, contractors are evil, pharma companies are evil. We love a good villain, eh?




That said and on the other hand, the dirty players in the pharma market disgust me. Something can and should be done about that. There is no rational argument for allowing price-games with necessary drugs to be played after the reasonable period of investment-recoupment is complete. Well, not unless one thinks the most important principle ever is letting companies do what they please because freedomz or something.

That "pharma bro" (I'm forgetting the name) should've been in jail for 30 years or something, though I doubt the statutes in question would have allowed it. I never checked. Bad players in the pharma industry....those are the evil ones. It's one things to play these games with smartphones or whatever, but with people's literal lives? To that I say: burn in hell, you soulless swine. (Ok, ok, fair point. Not soulless. If "soulless", then no hell, right?)
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This.

But the bad players are really a small minority.

And the excesses in promotion and sales have been gone for 15+ years now.

The system in place is largely the result of the regulations and structure of the market, which, like all of US healthcare, is a freaking disaster.

Pharma companies are merely working the system to get what they can- and literally giving away tons of free drug to people who can’t afford it to get the insurance companies who can is just part of the strange dance. PBMs promoting use of an expensive brand over a cheap generic just to get the rebate dollars is another. Oncology drugs costing $100k a pop and companies dropping entire areas of research to concentrate on cancer is another. And so is $500 insulin that is not going generic for a decade or two because of cumbersome biosimilar regulations.
 
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