The two swiss labs Novartis and Roche, who respectively commercialize Lucentis and Avastin in Europe (undistinguishable treatments both created by Genetech, an American lab bought back by Roche—also, Novartis owns 33.33% of Roche), tried a legal action against France. I assume it was to outlaw the use of Avastin in the eyes.
That seems unlikely to me. Our health system doesn’t work in a way that there’s a normal process for outlawing drugs for being used for certain purposes.
Let’s start with, Lucentis and Avastin are similar but the are not undistinguishable. They are both monoclononal antibodies against the same target but not the same. That’s why you have for example two different English Wikipedia pages for them which you don’t have for drugs were the same substance gets marketed under different brand names.
When repacking a drug that intravenously into one that’s optimized for intravitreal delievery it’s plausible that some optimization can be made. Wikipedia suggests that there’s review that even suggests low certainty evidence that there are clinically relevant differences. While those difference might be just the result of p-hacking it’s plausible that they are real.
Even the French Wikipedia doesn’t go into detail but a more likely scenario is that someone in the French health service thought that covering Lucentis with public health insurance is a waste of money when Avastin exists that costs 1⁄40 as much and that they ran a lawsuit to get French public health insurance to cover Lucentis.
If money wouldn’t be any concern, then the act of repackaging drugs to be better for a given clinical application makes a lot of sense. The key issue is how much profit a company deserves for doing that and the amount feels excessive for the service that’s provided.
That seems unlikely to me. Our health system doesn’t work in a way that there’s a normal process for outlawing drugs for being used for certain purposes.
Let’s start with, Lucentis and Avastin are similar but the are not undistinguishable. They are both monoclononal antibodies against the same target but not the same. That’s why you have for example two different English Wikipedia pages for them which you don’t have for drugs were the same substance gets marketed under different brand names.
https://go.drugbank.com/drugs/DB01270 and https://go.drugbank.com/drugs/DB00112 give you the sequences of the antibodies and even without comparing every letter you see that the molecular weight of one is a third of the other.
When repacking a drug that intravenously into one that’s optimized for intravitreal delievery it’s plausible that some optimization can be made. Wikipedia suggests that there’s review that even suggests low certainty evidence that there are clinically relevant differences. While those difference might be just the result of p-hacking it’s plausible that they are real.
Even the French Wikipedia doesn’t go into detail but a more likely scenario is that someone in the French health service thought that covering Lucentis with public health insurance is a waste of money when Avastin exists that costs 1⁄40 as much and that they ran a lawsuit to get French public health insurance to cover Lucentis.
If money wouldn’t be any concern, then the act of repackaging drugs to be better for a given clinical application makes a lot of sense. The key issue is how much profit a company deserves for doing that and the amount feels excessive for the service that’s provided.