drug-pricing
13 stories tagged "drug-pricing"
A Hundred Thousand Dollars, Two Inches, and a New Calculator for Sorting Short Children
About $100,000 buys a healthy short child two inches of height. A new calculator predicts who responds best, and it joins a field where some of the biggest datasets belong to the companies selling the hormone.
CancerMerck and Moderna Say Their Melanoma Vaccine Worked, but Two Months On the Public Still Hasn't Seen by How Much
Merck and Moderna have announced only that their phase 3 met its endpoints. The smaller trial behind the excitement missed the conventional two-sided significance bar, and one bank has modeled a price as high as $475,000 per patient.
InvestigationsThe Mandatory Drug-Pricing Rule Nearly Every Major Drugmaker Was Allowed to Skip
Medicare's actuaries scored the final rule at $440 million in savings. The proposal they started with was worth $12 billion.
Drugs & FDAThe FDA Approved a $3.95 Million Gene Therapy It Rejected Fourteen Months Ago
In July 2025 the FDA refused to approve this Sanfilippo gene therapy and faulted the factory, not the science. Fourteen months later it is the first treatment for a fatal childhood brain disease, cleared on 17 treated children against a comparison group the maker built, at $3.95 million a dose.
Drugs & FDAA Fatal Brain Disease in Children Finally Has a Drug, and It Lists at $1.14 Million a Year
Ionis's zilganersen is the first therapy ever approved for Alexander disease, and it lists near $1.14 million a year. The same FDA approval handed Ionis a rare pediatric disease voucher, the transferable coupon that has resold for as much as $350 million.
InvestigationsThe Escape Hatch in Trump's Drug Deal: 26 Companies Signed Their Way Out of the Price Cuts
Twenty-six drugmakers have signed voluntary White House agreements that exempt them from the proposed mandatory Medicare price cuts, and an analysis finds the deals could erase as much as 80 percent of the projected savings.
Drugs & FDASickle Cell Finally Has a Cure. It Costs $2.2 Million and Has Reached 64 People.
Casgevy has kept Victoria Gray crisis-free for seven years. Getting it still means wiping out a patient's bone marrow with a chemo tied to infertility and malignancy warnings and paying about $3 million all in, and two years after approval only 64 people have been infused.
Drugs & FDAThe Pancreatic-Cancer Pill That Doubles Survival: $39,800 a Month, and a Fast Lane Congress Never Approved
Rasonque roughly doubles median survival in metastatic pancreatic cancer. Revolution Medicines priced it at $477,600 a year, more than double Keytruda, and the FDA cleared it early through a voucher program lawmakers say Congress never authorized.
Drugs & FDARice Chemists Taught an Enzyme to Recycle Drug Synthesis's Most Expensive Ingredient
The chemistry that builds drugs like Spinraza just got cheaper. The $125,000 price tag never had much to do with the chemistry.
Drugs & FDAA $440,000 Drug Proved This Obesity Was Never About Willpower
Brain-tumor surgery can wreck the hypothalamus and leave hunger permanently switched on. Setmelanotide restored the missing signal in a real placebo-controlled trial, then arrived priced near half a million dollars a year.
Drugs & FDAThe Last Time Washington Went After Hospital Drug Markups, the Supreme Court Blocked It. This Time CMS Brought Receipts.
In 2018 the Supreme Court blocked CMS from cutting the markup 340B hospitals charge Medicare for discounted drugs, because the agency skipped a required survey. CMS ran the survey this time, and found seniors paying co-pays bigger than what the hospital paid for the drug.
Drugs & FDAMedicare's Product-Hopping Loophole Is Back On The Chopping Block. The Bigger Pharma Giveaway Isn't.
The Trump administration on Thursday proposed closing the product-hopping loophole that lets drugmakers reset Medicare's negotiation clock by tweaking inactive ingredients. It is the same fix the same administration quietly tabled in October.
CancerPancreatic cancer's undruggable wall just cracked. The follow-up is 8.5 months and the money was already placed.
Revolution Medicines' daraxonrasib nearly doubled median overall survival versus chemotherapy in previously treated metastatic pancreatic cancer at ASCO 2026, with 8.5 months of follow-up and a two-billion-dollar Royalty Pharma deal already riding on what comes next.