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Collaborating through gritted teeth

Pharma sector stakeholders still scoring points off each other despite new resources and talk of ‘shared purpose’

University Hospital Galway consultant medical oncologist Michael McCarthy with (from left) fellow panellists Caitríona Duggan, Lesley Tilson and Dr Katarzyna Whysal.

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Thu Mar 14 2024 - 06:00

Collaboration was the buzzword at the annual conference of the medicine developers based in Ireland last week where, among the speakers, was deputy director of the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics (NCPE) Dr Lesley Tilson.

The Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association (Ipha) has spent much of the past decade at loggerheads with the NCPE, whose job it is to vet medicines looking to enter the Irish market and see whether they provide value for money.

Part of that has been down to what the pharma groups have at times argued is a flawed assessment model that fails to appreciate the value, particularly of medicines targeting small patient populations but a more recurring complaint has been the length of time it takes medicine to get through the approvals process in Ireland compared to other European countries.

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But all that was forgotten even before Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly told delegates he was adding 34 new staff to the team policing drug approvals.

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Well, maybe not quite forgotten. Tilson was sitting on a panel with Amgen country head, Caitríona Duggan, who also serves as chairwoman of Ipha’s market access committee. And despite the oft-repeated talk of collaboration and shared purpose, both were not averse to scoring points for their respective “sides”.

Consultant medical oncologist Michael McCarthy, who works entirely in the public health system at University Hospital, Galway noted on the same panel that between 30 and 40 per cent of cancer drugs licensed by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) never even go before the NCPE Irish approvals and pricing system.

Duggan followed that up by declaring that 27 per cent of medicines developed by Ipha members do not get submitted to the system even as she welcomed the new era of “discussion, dialogue and shared purpose”.

Tilson was not to be bowed, telling delegates that timelines depended on all stakeholders, including industry.

“We cannot reimburse something if there is no application,” she said, adding that, in 2023, “only 12 per cent of submissions were made within the first month of [EMA] marketing authorisation”. Touché.

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