Boehringer: ‘devil in detail’ on new drug pricing policy
pharmafile | April 10, 2014 | News story | Medical Communications, Sales and Marketing | Boehringer, PPRS, VBP, Zinta Krumins, alltrials, vba
Zinta Krumins, the newly-appointed managing director of Boehringer Ingelheim UK and Ireland, has warned that the ‘devil is in the detail’ when it comes to the value-based assessment (VBA) of drugs.
Krumins, who took up the post in January, said then that it was “an interesting time for our industry”.
Part of the reason for this is that the latest five-year Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme (PPRS) means that the £12 billion NHS patented drugs budget for England must remain at that level for this year, and grow by no more than 2% until 2017 – in effect limiting how much money the pharma industry in the UK is allowed to make.
“We support PPRS,” said Krumins in her first public statement on the issue. “It allows companies to manage their business – but we still have to wait and see that it means innovation is going to be made available through the system.”
UK trade body ABPI agreed the deal in November with the government, and part of the agreement is the introduction of VBA: in March NICE launched a three-month consultation, which closes on 20 June, on how the latter will work in practice.
“VBA is a good thing,” Krumins insists. “Any system that allows the thorough assessment of the value of a medicine, that supports the innovation of a company, is a very good thing. The issue is that it means different things to different people. As an umbrella term it’s a bit too general. The devil is in the detail.”
But she appears relaxed about how this might play out. ‘It’s early days,’ she tells Pharmafile. “If the dialogue continues and there is an ability to make improvements in the system, it will work.”
“However, it needs many voices inputting into the process rather than a straight mathematical analysis,” she warned. “At the moment I’m not worried – I’d worry about it if there wasn’t the dialogue.”
The company is beginning to look at metrics for measuring how value might be assessed, she said.
Setting out her vision for Boehringer in the UK, she said: “Our pipeline looks very healthy at the moment although of course you never know what can fall out of research. But the UK is very important for Europe and Europe is important for the whole corporation.”
She also believes the culture of the organisation – it is in the Sunday Times Top 100 Best Companies to Work For – is important. “I want us to retain the general culture and environment of Boehringer,” she said. “It is possible to run a good business and have a good culture.”
Transparency debate
But she said that while Boehringer advocated transparency, it would not like fellow pharma firm GSK be signing up to the AllTrials campaign, adding that it would be ‘irresponsible’ to release all of its data.
“Generally we go beyond what we’re required to do,” she said. “Our ambition is to make information more transparent. “But it would be irresponsible to just put data out there on the interent and say ‘there it is'”.
Some data would be commercially confidential, she went on, and there would be a risk of confusion in simply putting other data into the public domain.
This remains a vexed subject: the European Medicines Agency announced this week that it was to further delay its policy over clinical trial transparency, saying it needs more time to speak with stakeholders with a second consultation.
But in a vote from the European Parliament last week, the EU will from 2016 no longer view clinical trial data as commercially confidential, meaning it can force pharma to give up its study information.
New oncology focus
Returning to products, Boehringer produced its first cancer drug, Giotrif (afatinib), last year and NICE recommended the EGFR-TK inhibitor – which works by blocking the signal pathways helping to slow the growth and spread of tumours – last month after a fast-track process.
“Oncology is an exciting new entry for us,” Krumins said. “After 25 years with the company, I’ve seen it from the beginning where we’ve said: ‘We have some products which might work’ to launching our first oncology product. It’s very exciting.”
Speaking about Boehringer’s chronic obstructive pulmonary disease medicine Spiriva (tiotropium bromide inhalation powder), Krumins said: “I have good feelings with Spiriva, when you talk to a patient who says: ‘I can walk down to the corner shop now’.” But oncology products affect patients in an even more fundamental way, she suggests.
“When you have people who can say: ‘I’ve got six to nine months more with my grandchildren’, that gives me a completely different feeling.”
Krumins has spent 17 years outside the UK and has previously been managing director of both the Turkish and Nordics regions for Boehringer.
Adam Hill
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