GlaxoSmithKline Presents Pipeline to Eurocrats for Feedback

There was a story Monday about GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) taking what’s being called an unusual step to prioritize their clinical candidates. According to the Wall Street Journal, they invited officials from the national health care plans of several European countries to a presentation on the company’s pipeline and asked them which ones they’d be more likely to pay for (and what they’d need to see in the clinic to convince them to do that).

Actually, I think the unusual thing here is that they made a formal meeting out of the whole process. I believe that this sort of thing goes on already – after all, drug companies spend a lot of time trying to figure out the size of potential markets and what the eventual purchasers will be willing to pay. In Europe, those are the national health care systems, and if they’re not willing to pay, your drug will go nowhere. In the US, you’re going to want to sound out the big health insurance companies for the same kind of reality check.

And I don’t see how GSK showed these officials anything that you wouldn’t see (or haven’t seen) at an investor’s conference – otherwise, we’d have seen some Regulation FD disclosures, since the company’s stock is listed on the NYSE. This seems to have been a one-stop rundown of what’s already been disclosed about the whole pipeline, but with opinions specifically solicited along the way– and the company’s not obliged to say what those opinions were or what they’re doing in response to them. GSK got a lot more previously unavailable information out of this process than the health care officials did.

How much, though, will this help? For one thing, I suspect that the officials didn’t say much that GSK didn’t know about what everyone wants for a new drug. They want it to work better than anything that’s currently on the market, with fewer side effects, and for less money. (There, that was easy). And predicting the future doesn’t always work too well. The medical landscape could always change by the time the drugs make it up to the regulatory stage.

There will also be a lot more information (good and bad) about the compounds themselves by that time, much of which could make these earlier discussions moot. “Remember that oncology drug we were developing? Well, turns out that it doesn’t work against quite as many different tumors as we were hoping, but. . .” or “Remember that CNS drug we were telling you about back in ’08? Well, turns out that it also has this little cardiovascular thing going, too, and. . .” In the end, the drugs will do what they will in the clinic, and the company will have to bring what it has, not what the regulators asked for.

And even though companies are already supposed to be doing this kind of legwork, there are still some spectacular disconnects. Sanofi-Aventis (SNY), for example, did manage to get Acomplia (rimonabant) on the market in Europe (which is more than they ever managed in the US), but they didn’t get the national health care to pay for it. More recently, as in "yesterday", the UK's health care system just told Glaxo itself that they're not going to pay for Tykerb/Tyverb (lapatinib), because they don't see the benefit for the price. And when we’re talking about totally mistaken ideas about market size and acceptance, how can we not mention Pfizer’s (PFE) Exubera?

Comments

[morgan77:]

Here's an article about the drug sector is beginning to make a move up, while the rest of the market continues to head down.
Nice succinct analysis of what's going on here v. the rest of the market.
www.greenfaucet.com/fa...

2008 Jul 09 07:18 PM