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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Amgen Publishes Biosimilar Trends Report

Biotech giant Amgen Inc. this week published the 8th edition of its Biosimilar Trends Report, which provides insights and data on biosimilar market trends and their impact on health care costs.

Biosimilars are drugs that are approved if they can successfully show high similarities to a drug that already has FDA approval. Biosimilars have no major clinical differences to the drugs they imitate, called reference drugs. Amgen has a big presence in the biosimilar market.

The report claims that biosimilar competition saved the U.S. health care system $9.8 billion in the last five years. Competition can potentially reduce patients’ out-of-pocket spending by $238 million within nine biologic drug classes where biosimilars have been approved.

Specifically, competition drives down health care costs by providing wholesale acquisition cost as well as average sales price discounts at launch, creating additional savings as time goes on. The report added that biosimilars are launching at prices about 15 percent to 37 percent lower than their reference drugs.

In a section of the report called the “Future State of the Marketplace,” Amgen wrote that it expects a “rapid evolution in the U.S. biosimilars marketplace.” The biotech giant also expects that there will be an expansion of biosimilars into pharmacy benefit reimbursement, presence of biosimilars in more therapeutic areas and approval of further interchangeable biosimilars.

Amgen has invested $2 billion across a portfolio of 10 biosimilar medicines.

Shares of Amgen closed up $1.41, or a fraction of a percent, to $215.05 on the Nasdaq Thursday, a day when the market climbed 1 percent.

Antonio Pequeño IV
Antonio Pequeño IV
Antonio “Tony” Pequeño IV is a reporter covering health care, finance and law for the San Fernando Valley Business Journal. He specializes in reporting on some of the biggest names in the Valley’s biotechnology sector. In addition to his work with the Business Journal, Tony has reported with BuzzFeed News on the unsupervised use of Clearview AI, a controversial facial recognition technology. Tony, who also conducts freelance reporting, graduated from the USC’s Master of Science in Journalism program in 2021. He is in his fifth year as a journalist as of 2021.

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