Genentech CEO on Drug Development and Pricing
Genentech’s CEO, Dr. Arthur Levinson, gives an interview in the Wall Street Journal on drug pricing and development. It’s a great article, and it can answer a lot of questions that people might have for the seemingly outrageous prices of biological drugs such as Avastin, Herceptin, and Lucentis, all of which are made by Genentech. There’s nothing here that people in the biotech industry wouldn’t already know, but it’s a wonderful look inside for the general public. Levinson also has a great point about generic biologics:
Makers of pharmaceutical pills can show chemical equivalence easily. But if you are producing a biological, it is not made by chemical synthesis. It is made by a Chinese hamster’s ovary cell or an E. coli bacterium — a very complex route. We do not yet have analytical techniques to tell you that a copy is clinically identical to the innovator’s drug. Our recommendation to the FDA would be to simply require a clinical trial to make sure that the drug is behaving in the clinic as expected.
