First step to Medicare clawbacks

Drugmakers will no longer be able to raise their prices faster than the rate of inflation. Well, they can, but Medicare won’t pay it — and the pharma companies will have to refund the difference if and when they overcharge. CMS has released its draft guidance on the new law, which is expected to save the government $170 billion over a decade.

Fun fact: A recent HHS report found that even when inflation was at 8.5%, there were 1,200 drug price increases above that.

The plan is similar to what Medicaid has been doing for three decades (although the Medicare version will hopefully close the loopholes pharma companies have exploited to avoid penalties).

Whatcha gonna do when the emergency is over

When the Covid public health emergency ends, chaos will reign. How can you, o pharmacists and technicians, help bring civilization out of the confusion and rubble?

Artist’s conception

By spending 30 minutes in a free GPhA webinar, The end of the public health emergency: What does it mean to pharmacy?

It’s Wednesday, February 22, at 8:00 am, and of course there will be Q&A afterwards (with UGA’s Jordan Khail, who coordinates the PharmD program’s pharmacy law, pharmacy management, and Essentials of Pharmacy Practice courses).

If you’re wondering about who will be able to give immunizations, or whether prescriptions are needed for vaccines and antivirals, or anything else related to Covid-19, this is the time to get your answers.

Click here to register today!

Farmer named to Board of Pharmacy

GPhA’s 1998-1999 president — and 2008 winner of the Bowl of Hygeia — Michael Farmer has been named to the Georgia Board of Pharmacy by Governor Brian Kemp. Congratulations, Michael!

First bills targeting pharma

The Senate will soon be considering five bills that, as Endpoints put it, “will prohibit and slow some of the games pharma companies often play to extend their monopolies before generic competition comes to market.”

One, for example (S. 1428), will ban “pay-for-delay” deals, where a drug makers pays a genetic competitor not to enter the market.

• Another (S. 113) would require the Federal Trade Commission to investigate PBMs “and provide Congress with appropriate policy recommendations.”
• S. 1425 would empower the FTC to “deter filing of sham citizen petitions” — that’s when pharma companies file petitions pretending to be from ordinary folks.
• S. 1435 would ban “product hopping” — when drug companies make clinically insignificant changes to a drug to deter generic competition.
• S. 79 would create “an interagency task force between the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the FDA.”

Kids’ Covid vax is official

Annual Covid vaccinations (i.e., boosters) are now an official part of the CDC/American Academy of Pediatricians recommendations for childhood vaccines. That is all.

Bio bots deliver drugs

Getting drugs exactly where they need to go is a big deal these days, with all sorts of new tech (biological and nanotechnological) being aimed at the problem.

One trick is to use bacteria to deliver drugs, steering them with magnetic fields. But that’s so 2018.

UC San Diego engineers instead are using swimming microscopic algae that they coated with drug-containing nanoparticles — what they call a microbot. Because it’s algae, the immune system mostly ignores it, and the ’bots can be steered to the right place using light.

Treatment with microalgae worked despite a dose of antibiotics 3,000 times smaller than was needed intravenously, which could reduce side effects,

The problem they’re working on now is the best way to deliver the algae — inhalers of some sort are currently topping the list.

Plain algae on the left; microbot on the right

The Long Read: No Interferon For You edition

An interferon drug — pegylated interferon lambda — works as well as Paxlovid in cutting Covid hospitalization, is “variant proof” unlike monoclonal antibodies, and can even stop other viral infections. Excellent trial results were just published in the New England Journal of Medicine. But you won’t be seeing it in the US anytime soon.