Drug Price Controls Delay the Fight Against Alzheimer’s
On Tuesday, the Biden Administration’s Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will announce which ten drugs will be subject to new price caps. While this will be welcome news to Medicare patients, it’s a gut punch for Americans suffering from Alzheimer’s. In Maine, the state with the oldest population in the nation, the impact of Medicare drug price controls will be felt for decades.
Most of the profits that pharmaceutical companies reinvest into developing cures for diseases like Alzheimer’s come from drugs covered by Medicare. Patients on Medicare make up the highest users of prescription drugs. That means that drug makers cannot realistically make a profit without providing products through Medicare. For companies employing researchers to test potential treatments for Alzheimer’s, price caps mean less funding for product development.
Companies like Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca are scrambling to reorganize their research and development (R&D) plans and deprioritize the development of different drugs to account for lost revenue. Both of these companies are developing new drugs to treat Alzheimer’s, and the cost of those developments are currently reflected in the drug prices through Medicare. With enough profit to invest in R&D, companies could expand product options, potentially lowering costs of today’s medications in the future. Price controls ensure that won’t happen and postpone drug development for Alzheimer’s patients across the nation.
Alzheimer's impacts 6 million Americans and is the seventh-leading cause of death in the United States. There are currently only two FDA-approved drugs on the market now that can treat it: Leqembi, which costs $26,500 for a year of treatment out of pocket, and Aduhelm, which costs $28,200. It’s small wonder that few drugs can accomplish what they can: Effective medication must deliver the drug to the human brain’s separate blood supply and regulate the buildup of plaques. Multiple companies like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson have sunk millions into Alzheimer’s research, only to come up empty-handed. A single Alzheimer's drug developed by both companies that scrapped in 2012 cost them a combined $300-400 million dollars.
More funding is needed to develop better, cheaper, and more accessible drugs to treat Alzheimer’s. But when pharmaceutical companies are not able to make money off the drug their researchers’ spent years and millions creating, the incentive to develop new, cheaper drugs for complex diseases like Alzheimer’s is devastated.
The drugs being developed to treat and cure Alzheimer’s, Eli Lilly’s lecanemab and AstraZeneca’s saracatinib need more research before hitting the shelves, and that means more investment. Most attempts to bring a drug to market end in failure as they must undergo multiple test trials, get approved by the FDA, and account for any side-effects that may make the drug more of a risk to take than the disease it treats. AstraZeneca’s saracatinib was originally developed to treat cancer, but was discontinued in tests due to lack of efficacy. Now, AstraZeneca is considering delaying launches of some cancer drugs as it tries to adapt its R&D spending to these new price controls. That could mean AstraZeneca’s Alzheimer’s drugs are not within reach of U.S. patients.
Americans having access to only two FDA-approved Alzheimer’s drugs will likely remain the status quo. Pharmaceutical sales correlate with research and development (R&D). In 2018 alone, if price controls in 32 OECD were lifted, $56.4 billion more dollars would have been invested into pharmaceutical R&D. Since then, multiple companies like Pfizer, Roche, and Eli Lilly have abandoned several drugs that may have cost more than $2 billion dollars each. Existing price controls in other countries already limit pharmaceutical companies’ ability to reinvest profits into further R&D. By instituting extensive price controls on commonly-used drugs, the U.S. will reduce the manufacturing of new drugs by almost 40% in the long run, with complex diseases like Alzheimer’s being left on the table first.
Capping prices treats the symptom of medical costs, not the disease. Maine has a total of geriatricians as of 2021 and needs to increase the trained caregiver workforce by 8% to meet the demand for Alzheimer’s care. The need to develop more effective and affordable medicine to combat this disease cannot be ignored. By capping prices, the Biden Administration is cutting short the industry’s search for a cure.
Roy Mathews is a Writer for Young Voices
