Sunday, September 13, 2026 Evidence-led medical research news
The First Cohort
Medical research, with the receipts

drug-pricing

7 stories tagged "drug-pricing"

Drugs & FDA

Sickle 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 & FDA

The 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 & FDA

Rice 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 & FDA

A $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 & FDA

The 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 & FDA

Medicare'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.

Cancer

Pancreatic 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.