Last month, the governor of Arizona signed a bill into law allowing pharmacists to automatically substitute a biosimilar for a reference branded biologic. Arizona continues the recent trend of states enacting biosimilar automatic substitution laws, including, for example, New Jersey and Oregon. Under the new Arizona law, from December 31, 2016 onward,…
A couple weeks ago, Oregon passed a law that allows pharmacists to automatically substitute a biosimilar for the reference branded biologic. According to this new legislation, before a biosimilar can be automatically substituted, it must be approved by the FDA as an “interchangeable” biosimilar, and the prescriber must not have…
On Tuesday, Chris Christie, Governor of New Jersey, signed an automatic substitution bill into law that would allow pharmacists to substitute a biological product that has been determined by FDA to be “interchangeable with” or “therapeutically equivalent to” a prescribed biological product unless the prescriber indicated that there should be…
On September 24, 2015, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) released a biosimilars guidance document, available here. In it, the NHS bans automatic substitution of biosimilars, meaning that pharmacists may not switch between biosimilars and reference biologics, or between one biosimilar and another, without the consent of the prescribing…