Continued Global Pressure on Drug Pricing and Reimbursement for Effective Market Access: A Hard Pill to Swallow?

In The News
August 29, 2022

We are now in the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic which has brought about a global upheaval with particular dramatic and enduring changes for the life sciences and healthcare sectors. New Omicron subvariants are creating new concerns in many countries that may call for new bivalent vaccines and antiviral agents to be developed with ambitious timetables for approval and access. COVID-19 will become a critical inflection point for drug pricing and reimbursement. The pandemic has brought about significant changes to the business and legislative environments for drug pricing and it will continue to do so in ways that will alter the pharmaceutical supply chain and patient access to innovative, cutting-edge preventive and therapeutic drugs and biologicals. The dual needs for incentivising pharmaceutical innovation and safeguarding the use of government funds will continue and will remain somewhat in tension. Governments, policymakers and payers across the globe are increasingly committed to containing drug prices. In this ever-evolving market access landscape, existing cost-containment measures have been given more bite and new measures have been developed on health economic grounds.

Several global legislative, regulatory, and business and innovation trends are observed to date that may signal what may come in the future: from measures aimed at increasing the transparency of drug pricing; to the increasing use of real world evidence in health technology assessment procedure and new approaches to international drug pricing.

These topics are addressed in a Global Legal Insights - Pricing & Reimbursement 2022 chapter authored by life sciences regulatory & compliance partner Lincoln Tsang (London), head of the firm’s European Life Sciences practice, health care partner Margaux Hall (Washington, D.C.) and life sciences regulatory & compliance associate Hannah Kerr-Peterson (London).