ICER Revises Report on Rheumatoid Arthritis Therapies

The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) released an updated draft report on the cost-effectiveness of rheumatoid arthritis treatments but the new approach did not change the overall findings.

The price watchdog withdrew the draft report within days of its release, saying it needed to reconsider how it was modeling Eli Lilly’s Olumiant (baricitinib), Pfizer’s Xeljanz (tofacitinib) and AbbVie’s Rinvoq (upadacitinib).

For the updated report, ICER considered that when the line-one treatment fails, patients are transitioned to “a market basket of targeted immune modulators,” as opposed to palliative care.

Also, because clinical differentiation between the therapies is uncertain over time, “we will now analyze their cost-effectiveness in the first year of use, instead of over a patient’s lifetime,” the institute said. It also added a 16 percent loss in efficacy once patients transition out of line-one treatment and move to the second line market basket of immune modulators.