{"id":1808,"date":"2024-11-08T02:48:01","date_gmt":"2024-11-08T02:48:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=1808"},"modified":"2024-11-08T02:48:01","modified_gmt":"2024-11-08T02:48:01","slug":"battle-royale-small-molecules-vs-biologics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=1808","title":{"rendered":"Battle Royale: Small molecules vs. biologics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) allows the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to negotiate drug prices. However, CMS can only negotiated drug prices 9 years after drug approval for small molecules and 13 years after approval for large molecules.  Why the difference?  Do biologic treatments produce superior health benefits for patients?  <\/p>\n<p>This is the question that a paper by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.healthaffairs.org\/doi\/abs\/10.1377\/hlthaff.2024.00363\">Clifford et al. (2024)<\/a> aims to answer.   The use data on 1999\u20132018 drug approvals and evaluate cost-effectiveness analyses (CEA) to measure the health benefits of each treatment\u2013whether small molecule or biologic\u2013using the quality-adjusted life years (QALY) metric.  Using this approach, the authors found CEAs for 271 of the 622 drugs FDA-approved drugs, of which 199 were small molecule and 72 were biologic.  Using this approach, they found that: <\/p>\n<p>Median health gains were 0.100 (interquartile range: \u20130.104 to 0.304) QALYs for small-molecule drugs versus 0.084 (IQR: \u20130.156 to 0.324) QALYs for biologics\u2026Ten of the twenty drugs with the largest incremental health gains were small-molecule drugs, fifteen were orphan drugs, and eight were indicated to treat a cancer. <\/p>\n<p>In short, small molecules produced similar or even slightly more health benefits per patients then biologics.  Additionally, small molecules were less expensive than biologics and delivered more value.<\/p>\n<p><em>Median incremental costs were $4,738 (IQR: \u201314,091 to 23,567) for small-molecule drugs versus $16,020 (IQR: \u201329,531 to 61,571) for biologics. <\/em>Ten of the twenty drugs with the largest incremental costs were small-molecule drugs, sixteen were orphan drugs, and four were indicated to treat a cancer\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Small-molecule drugs had a median ICER of $108,314 per QALY\u2026versus $228,286 per QALY\u2026for biologics<\/p>\n<p>You can read the full study <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.healthaffairs.org\/doi\/abs\/10.1377\/hlthaff.2024.00363\">here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) allows the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to negotiate drug prices. However, CMS can only negotiated drug prices 9 years after drug approval for small molecules and 13 years after approval for large molecules. Why the difference? Do biologic treatments produce superior health benefits for patients? This is the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1808"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1808\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}