Heralded as a potential turning point for U.S. innovation in the 21st century, the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, S. 1260, is a big step closer to becoming law. The Senate voted 68-32 June 8 to pass the sweeping $250 billion bipartisan bill intended to give the U.S. an edge over China when it comes to innovation and investment in several critical industries, including artificial intelligence, biotechnology and quantum computing.
Originally intended as a way to help provide health care to uninsured and underinsured Americans, the 340B program has mutated into a revenue stream that’s benefiting large U.S. hospital systems, contract pharmacies and even pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) while contributing to higher drug prices for patients, according to stakeholders speaking at a May 26 Air 340B summit on the federal program.
The May 25 appearance of Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, before a congressional committee revolved in large part around the Biden administration’s so-called ARPA-H proposal, but the administration’s proposal to waive intellectual property rights for vaccines was also on tap.
With the intense focus on developing COVID-19 diagnostics, sequencing tools, vaccines and treatments, the pandemic is having an outsized impact on the global development of drugs and devices to treat other diseases. Recent data show that more than 1,000 clinical trials worldwide remain disrupted by COVID-19, including 60% of the non-COVID-19 trials being conducted in the U.S., as funding and other resources continue to be directed toward ending the pandemic.
A grueling day of congressional questions and accusations isn’t the end of a U.S. House Oversight Committee investigation into Abbvie Inc.’s pricing of blockbuster drugs Humira and Imbruvica.
As part of its ongoing investigation into what it considers excessive price increases for some prescription drugs, the U.S. House Oversight Committee plans to put Abbvie Inc. CEO and Chairman Richard Gonzalez on the hot seat May 18 for a grilling on the company’s pricing of Humira and Imbruvica.
Nearly a week after U.S. President Joe Biden called on Congress to get prescription drug pricing reform done, a House subcommittee took up dueling bills aimed at bringing down drug prices.
The Biden administration’s fiscal 2022 budget proposal included an allocation for an office described as the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Health, or ARPA-H, which would receive $6.5 billion as part of the National Institutes of Health.
The Biden administration has released an exceedingly brief budget framework for fiscal year 2022 that includes $6.5 billion for an advanced research program at the NIH, which mimics a similar program at the Department of Defense (DoD). Beyond that, there is a clear indication that the CDC would see an uptick in monies, but the proposal offers no numbers for the FDA budget, making this one of the skinnier budget proposals to come out of the White House in recent memory.
If the biopharma industry thought its round-the-clock efforts and considerable financial investments in tackling COVID-19 would earn it good will in the U.S. Congress, those hopes were dashed March 23 when both Democrats and Republicans serving on a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions subcommittee reverted to blaming drug companies for much of what’s wrong with the U.S. health care system.
