STAT+: Pharmalittle: We’re reading about a Medicare pilot and orphan drugs, Pfizer cutbacks, and more
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- Biotechs are lobbying the Trump administration to exclude rare disease drugs from the Medicare GUARD pilot program, which targets retail drugs in Medicare Part D, STAT reports.
- Thomas Hwang, who heads the Cancer Innovation and Regulation Initiative at Harvard Medical School, said exempting all companies with most-favored nation deals would cut potential savings from the program by 71%.
- The GUARD pilot is part of a broader Trump administration plan to lower U.S. drug prices to levels seen in other wealthy countries through so-called "most-favored nation" pricing.
- AstraZeneca and Bristol Myers Squibb are not in active deal talks, Reuters reports, with a source saying "There is no deal... There never was a deal to be done, and there are no discussions between the companies."
- The Financial Times reported Sunday that the two drugmakers had held preliminary talks about a potential mega-merger that would create a combined company worth nearly $400 billion.
Why it matters: Excluding rare disease drugs from the GUARD pilot would "wipe out much of the savings from retail meds," per STAT, and Hwang's 71% figure quantifies how much of the Trump administration's most-favored-nation drug-pricing push rides on this lobbying fight. Separately, the AZN-BMS denial confirms there was no active $400 billion merger to begin with — dashing the prospect of one of pharma's biggest-ever combinations.
