RevMed胰腺癌药年定价超47.5万美元

Madison, thanks so much for joining us today. Uh, I have to sort out for you what is this pill and how does it treat cancer differently? Yeah. So this pill is called rise on Q um, it's a little bit of an interesting drug name, as they all are. So it might take you a couple, a couple times to get used to saying it. Um, but what it does is it targets a protein called rise. So you can kind of hear that in the drug's name itself.

Um, which is mutated in most patients with pancreatic cancer. And it's a protein that has proven to be pretty difficult to broadly target in the past. And so what Rathmann has done is they've figured out a sort of different approach that kind of smothers the protein and is proven to be really effective in pancreatic cancer, which for decades has really just been treated with chemotherapy. And often pancreatic cancer is diagnosed a bit later.

And so people who have advanced forms of pancreatic cancer typically don't have that long to live. And so this drug has pretty much revolutionized the treatment of pancreatic cancer. Gives people a little bit longer to live, which in this disease is is really important because like I said, uh, typically once you're at the later stages, people's outcomes are not very good. Yeah, just a few months, I mean, but but Madison, it also, you know, tells us that it is such a debilitating disease with these late stage diagnoses that what this doubles the the time that somebody stays alive.

But it's only like 13 months even with the medication. Yeah, exactly. So that's one of the hard things. It's like even though this is a big advancement, a big breakthrough for people with pancreatic cancer, we're not talking about that much time in sort of the grand scheme of things. But the other benefit of this drug is that it's a once daily pill, so people might be able to actually spend more time at home or with families, versus going to a cancer clinic, going to a cancer center and getting an infusion, getting chemotherapy.

So this is something that can be taken and done at home. And so when we're talking about months of life left. It gives people back their time in a way to that's really, um, impactful. Yeah. And that's really irreplaceable. I mean, I want to get to the car side of it, too, because we mentioned it's one of the most expensive as well. Uh, more than 475,000 a year. But what are what are the sales expectations for something like that?

Yeah, the sales expectations are pretty high. I mean, I think analysts are expecting in the billions. I think the latest I saw was maybe 9 billion. Um, but it's you know, this is sort of in line with what analysts were expecting for this drug. I think investors expectations were actually even a little bit higher in terms of the price, and at least from what analysts were saying yesterday in the wake of this approval, they do think that this price is justified for the benefit that the drug provides.

Um, the next though challenge will sort of be whether, you know, we see broad coverage, um, whether this is something that is accessible to people, uh, on insurance plans and kind of what the uptake will look like. The company said that, you know, as of yesterday, the drug would already be available. And interestingly, the company has been doing this program, an expanded access program, before the drug was even approved.

That allowed people who really needed this drug to apply to be able to get it. And so there are already there's already a pretty large number of patients out there who have been receiving this drug. And so there's kind of this built in patient population already and people that are already taking it. And that makes the launch even stronger. Can you explain this for for the layperson, I mean, the person who goes out and gets a prescription and pays ten bucks for for a prescription, you know, as a copay, like, does the list price matter if somebody has insurance coverage?

Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. That's something that I think has actually entered the mainstream conversation a little bit more recently because of weight loss, drugs and people talking about cash price list price. Um, and sort of like all of these dynamics that are, that are quite, uh, obtuse and I think difficult to see through and understand, kind of purposefully so and so it's it is it's hard to, I guess, conceptualize what price actually matters to the patients because insurance companies are typically paying the lowest price.

Um, and so patients might be paying a copay. They're usually not paying this massive, you know, half $1 million price tag. But at the same time, it's still matters in terms of accessibility with coverage and what insurance, uh, plans decide to cover it. Cover. They usually are paying a lower price as well because they are working out various rebates. Uh, and so the pricing dynamics are always a bit confusing and always a challenge.

But it does matter for, you know, the care and the access, you know, accessibility and people get just because, um, it depends that that price is sort of important for what actually goes on an insurance plan and what they decide to cover. So pushing a little further on this, Madison, just to understand how the sausage is made, does every insurance company now have to go out and negotiate with Revolution Medicine to come to an agreement about what they will cover of that?

You know, close to $500,000 a year. Yeah, that's what we're still kind of trying to to figure out. We haven't heard from the insurance companies yet whether they're going to cover this drug. I think the expectation is that they will, um, as well as it will probably be available for patients with Medicare plans. So we're kind of waiting to see how the coverage landscape shapes up, as is sort of the case anytime a new drug is approved.

But that is that is right, that they'll have to go out sort of talk. And I'm sure they already have been talk to some of these PBMs and figure out, um, a way for them to pay for these drugs and to cover it, which is more difficult and more complicated when you have such an expensive medication. Well, it seems like people have been talking about this medication for a while for this pill. Um, is there any talk about expanding it further, let's say for early stage pancreatic cancer or maybe other, other types of cancer in general.

Yeah, exactly. That's the next sort of step in this. That's what they're doing now. Um, they're looking at moving it into earlier stages of pancreatic cancer because like we said, this was for a pretty advanced later stage IT form of the disease. Um, and so they're looking at moving it earlier, which would obviously expand the patient population even further. They're also looking at, uh, this drug in lung cancer. And so that could be another place for expansion.

Um, and then the hope is that this will sort of usher in, uh, new wave of treatments. There are even more sort of similar approaches being looked at and developed now. Uh, my colleague Bob Langwith had a great story in Business Week that came out yesterday as well, looking at kind of the landscape right now and what other treatments are being developed. And so the hope is that this will be sort of the first of many and will usher in another new wave of cancer treatment.

And I mean, over the last week, we have seen some great news in oncology, both with this and then with the Moderna Merck, uh, cancer vaccine news that we got. Feels like a long time ago, but it was only a week ago. Um, that. There seems to be some movement and some excitement in oncology right now, which is great. And it's, you know, a positive development. I feel like we've been talking so much about just weight loss drugs over the last couple of years, but there is a lot more happening in the farmer world and a lot happening in oncology as well.

That's quite exciting. All right, so you mentioned weight loss drugs. I'm going to go there. And um, so something you're