We believe the FDA’s new COVID vaccine guidelines are too narrow, leaving young children vulnerable. If it were up to us and we were deciding on how to best use boosters, we would have approved and recommended them for healthy children under 5 years of age and to pregnant women (which protects infants under 6 months who are ineligible for vaccination due to their immature immune systems).

President Trump’s recent “most-favored nation” proposal seeks to compel companies to charge the same prices in the US as they do elsewhere. But the price controls sought by MFN override market negotiation and threaten to backfire by drastically reducing spending on R&D that drives tomorrow’s treatments and cures. That would undermine the return on investment America has been getting – financially and in terms of better health. Instead of price-controlling in the US, we must convince other countries to pay their fair share for novel medicines. This is an intractable trade puzzle that the US should begin trying to solve. And to end other countries’ freeriding, first we need to examine the extent of it.

To truly appreciate the advances offered by GCEA, there's nothing as illustrative as getting in there and running the numbers yourself. However, building a de-novo cost-effectiveness model can be a daunting task. 

Well, not to worry! Just in time for the ISPOR Annual Meeting 2025, we've released an easy-to-use GCEA calculator that allows you to explore and appreciate the societal value of innovative medicines, and underpin the key value drivers without building a full-on model. The GCEA calculator offers an interactive user interface that lets you customize your own GCEA. 

Understanding how investors use NPV to value drugs at various stages of drug development explains what CBO's and other analyses miss.

By optimizing mineral extraction from both brine waste and natural brines through technological innovation and improved management, we can address critical mineral demand while also mitigating the environmental damage from conventional brine disposal.

As we break for the holidays and begin to look forward to 2025, we're also taking a beat to look back on what most drew our readers' attention in 2024. 

Unlike our healthcare spending that goes to services and should be considered an expense, the mere 8% we spend on novel medicines doesn’t just pay for the same things year over year – it’s an investment in progress. Surprised it’s such a small fraction? Most people are.

Last week’s publication in the Forum for Health Economics and Policy of Valuing the Societal Impact of Medicines and Other Health Technologies: A User Guide to Current Best Practices is a watershed moment for the field of health economics and outcomes research. 

Thanks to the relentless efforts of scientists at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, there will likely soon be a novel non-opioid pain medicine. How insurance plans, including Medicare, decide to cover this drug will make a world of difference to whether we get even better non-opioid options down the road — and whether this progress makes a dent in the ongoing opioid misuse crisis.

Policies favored by both parties’ leadership – who find it politically easier to battle made-up bogeymen than tackle real issues – threaten to undermine our national health security and eviscerate America’s world-leading innovative drug development industry.

The bottom line is that when it comes to global revenues for innovative medicines, US revenues for “winners” (the top selling drugs) matter most, since these come at the highest profit margin and launch more quickly, and serve as the primary incentive for biomedical innovation.

All else being equal, people care more about outcomes that happen in the near future than about outcomes that happen later. The discount rate represents how much timing matters. We sit down with Josh Cohen, Deputy Director of the Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health (CEVR) at the Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts Medical Center, and Research Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, to learn about how changes to the discount rate can alter how we value medicines.

Generalized cost-effectiveness analysis (GCEA), a framework to comprehensively assess the societal value of innovative health technologies, will be officially debuted at the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) conference in Atlanta this week

Whether you enjoy air travel or not, it’s increasingly common and persistently bad for the environment. Almost three million passengers fly in and out of US airports each day and global demand for air travel is expected to double by 2050. In addition to emitting pollutants that lower air quality, aviation is recognized as a hard-to-decarbonize sector and accounts for ~3% of global CO2 emissions. Airlines have recently announced commitments to switch to "green" fuels, but as of today 95% of jet fuel is produced from fossil fuels. Why is that? 

Many people who dedicate their lives to discovering, developing, and making new, lifesaving drugs don’t understand the extent to which the drug industry has failed to communicate its value proposition to society and to inspire its customers to pay for that value. That is to say, when the public and even legislators representing our biotech innovation hubs focus on the price of a breakthrough drug without a sense of its value or how it came into being and insist that innovators should not only invent medicines but pay for them, too, that’s a self-inflicted wound. Vertex’s Trikafta, one of our industry’s greatest success stories, provides an example.

As a pioneering PDAB takes its first baby steps in Colorado, we’re getting the impression that we’re watching the rules being made up as it goes along. Fortunately, we’re also witnessing the power of organized and impassioned patient advocacy to slow, reverse, and maybe someday reshape misinformed public policy.

Let’s dig into some of the most recycled materials in the world – metals – and how we might make metals recycling even better. We are obsessed with metals because they are critical materials to human civilization and well-being, which is why improved scrap metal recovery is good for the economy, good for the environment, and good for people – exactly the kind of win-win-wins we live for at Planetary Health.

Congress has set its sights on China’s biotechnology industry and the US’s reliance on it. Legislators are worried about the Chinese Communist Party’s access to Americans’ genetic data and US taxpayer funds helping bolster CCP-affiliated companies and are proposing to sever ties between any federally funded work and Chinese “companies of concern,” which include BGI and Wuxi AppTech. 

Let’s talk about something everyone produces but nobody really likes – trash. People produce billions of tons of waste annually. While there are many ways to reduce the amount of waste we produce, it is not possible to stop it entirely. Waste is, quite literally, inevitable. The disorder (entropy) in the universe increases with time, which just means that things will always break and there will always be some amount of waste. Once our things become our trash, we have two options: we can dispose of them or we can try to reclaim them as a resource. From a planetary health perspective, there are a lot of reasons to want to reclaim wastes as resources. Unfortunately, it is not easy to do so economically.

In covering how Egypt managed to eradicate hepatitis C, the New York Times rewrites a key bit of history that betrays its misunderstanding of global drug pricing. Egypt’s access to the life-saving Harvoni was a gift from Gilead, not a result of a bare knuckle negotiation. It’s important to understand and explain the increasingly vulnerable system that underpins that gift before bad policy dismantles it.