Column: Medical Innovation Needed to Analyze Drug Cost-Effectiveness

The unprecedented Medicare drug price negotiations and the rise of precision medicine herald a sea change coming to the U.S. pharmaceutical market over the next decade as the federal government now has the power to set prices for widely used Part D drugs.

Meanwhile, precision medicine holds promise for gene therapies and other drugs tailored to the specific needs of individual patients, enabling breakthroughs against dreaded diseases but likely at high costs no longer defrayed by treating a large population of patients with the same drug.

These competing forces highlight the critical need for measuring the value of new drugs; pricing needs to reflect value, with effective drugs rewarded more than ineffective ones. Currently the pharmaceutical industry depends on metrics of value that, we now know, can skew perceptions of which treatments are worth funding and pursuing.

The opinions of the authors do not necessarily reflect those of FDAnews.

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