Goodbye, Glibera!

The most expensive medicine in the world is being withdrawn from sale

Anna Stavina, XX2 century, based on MIT Technology Review: The World's Most Expensive Medicine Is Being Pulled from the Market

Pharmaceutical Company UniQure, the creator of the first means for gene therapy in the West, is going to withdraw its development from sale due to insufficient demand. The drug Glybera (Glybera) has become the most expensive drug in history: the price of one course of injections is about 1 million US dollars. The drug based on genetically modified adenoassociated viruses was intended for the treatment of a rare metabolic disease, congenital deficiency of the enzyme lipoproteinase.

In Europe, the drug was approved in 2012. The process was accompanied by delays and a number of comments on security issues. Obtaining permission to use Glibera was an important milestone in the development of gene therapy, however, low demand for the drug and doubts about its effectiveness negatively affected UniQure.

"It's not just that the drug costs a million dollars. The drug was released to the market without sufficient evidence to prove that it is really worth the money," says Casey Quinn, a specialist in health economics from the Center for Biomedical Innovation Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Quinn is studying pricing in the European pharmaceutical market.

This week, representatives of UniQure announced that they were not going to renew the license for the sale of Gliber in Europe. The current license expires in October, and the drug will be available to patients until the expiration of the document.

"The use of Glibera has been extremely limited, and we cannot imagine that the demand for the drug will significantly increase in the foreseeable future," the company said in a statement.

Quinn does not believe that the failure of Glibera can negatively affect other drugs for gene therapy. However, problems of a commercial nature put us in front of the question of exactly how prices for similar funds should be set in the future.

This year, several drugs for gene therapy are awaiting approval by the US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA). Among them is a drug for the treatment of congenital blindness, created by Spark Therapeutics, and an antitumor drug for the so–called CAR-T therapy, a joint development of Novartis and Kite Pharma.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  24.04.2017