Rome, 14 May 2024 – “The fight against the phenomenon of shortages also involves recognizing the need to make many essential medicines economically sustainable. We are working on this aspect.” Thus the President of AIFA, Robert Nisticò, at the end of the first meeting with the President of EGUALIA (Equivalent drug industries, value-added biosimilars), Stefano Collatina, which took place at the Agency’s headquarters.
A comparison that immediately highlighted the need to concentrate attention and efforts on combating the phenomenon of shortages, so that essential and critical drugs for all chronic therapies, where equivalent and biosimilar drugs represent an essential resource, continue to be made available to patients without interruption. A technical working group will therefore be launched to identify concrete tools and measures that address the issue of industrial economic sustainability of equivalent and biosimilar medicines.
“It will be necessary to combine the current procedures with suitable tools to grasp the determining factors that make widely used drugs unavailable on a continuous basis or, worse, completely lacking, and to act – stated the technical-scientific director of AIFA, Pierluigi Russo – so that , in compliance with overall spending constraints, these drugs remain economically and industrially sustainable for businesses”.
EGUALIA highlighted the data relating to the important gap in the use of equivalents between the Italian regions, as well as the high expenditure of over one billion euros incurred by Italian patients every year when they do not choose a drug equivalent to the reference price, a significantly concentrated in the south of the country.
Finally, with a view to simplification, the commitment was shared, through a working group, to continue the work of simplifying the authorization and price and reimbursement procedures, reducing the workflows for the newly formed Scientific and Economic Commission (CSE) of the ‘Agency precisely on those procedures that concern equivalents and biosimilars.
