Rome, 16 May – Recognizing the need to make many essential medicines economically sustainable: the path to combating and reducing the phenomenon of drug shortages on the market also passes through this. This was stated by the president of Aifa Robert Nistico (in the picture)after meeting with Stefano Collatina, president of Egualia, the acronym of the equivalent, biosimilar and drug industries value added medicines.
The discussion was held at the headquarters of the national regulatory agency and, as stated in a note, highlighted the need to concentrate “attention and effort” 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 interruptions”.
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 drugs, informed by the agency.
“It will be necessary to combine the current procedures with suitable tools to capture the factors determinants that make widely used drugs unavailable on a continuous basis or, worse, completely lacking, and take action” details the technical-scientific director of AIFA, Pierluigi Russo (in the picture) “so that, in compliance with overall spending constraints, these drugs remain economically and industrially sustainable for businesses”.
During the meeting with the Aifa leaders, Egualia highlighted the data relating to the gap in the use of equivalents between the Italian regions, reporting an expenditure of “over a billion euros” every year for the so-called differential on the reference price, i.e. the “ticket” that citizens must pay when they do not choose an equivalent drug but the corresponding branded drug. A phenomenon, Egualia notes, “significantly concentrated in the South of the country”.
Finally, 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 Agency’s newly created Scientific and Economic Commission (CSE) precisely on those procedures involving equivalents and biosimilars.
