After a committee hearing on the price of rheumatoid arthritis drugs last week, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) announced that she is working on a bill designed to lower drug costs. According to Bloomberg Law, the aim of the legislation would be to restrict “evergreening,” described as “the practice of extending…
Last week, Oregon passed a law that allows pharmacists to automatically substitute a biosimilar with a prescribed biological product. According to their new legislation, before a biosimilar can be automatically substituted, it must be approved by the FDA to be “interchangeable,” and the prescriber must not have forbidden the substitution. Oregon…
President Barack Obama will be joined today by Vice President Biden, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI), and other Congressional leaders for the signing ceremony for the 21st Century Cures Act. The signing ceremony will take place at 2:30 pm ET. The bill signing will be live streamed here beginning…
A bill introduced in the House of Representatives yesterday proposes “[t]o amend the Public Health Service Act to shorten the exclusivity period for brand name biological products from 12 to 7 years.” Titled the “Price Relief, Innovation, and Competition for Essential Drugs Act,” or the “PRICED Act,” the proposed bill…
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…