How A Drugmaker Gamed The System To Keep Generic Competition Away
When Celgene Corp. first started marketing the drug Revlimid to treat multiple myeloma in 2006, the price was $6,195 for 21 capsules, a month's supply.
By the time David Mitchell started taking Revlimid in November 2010, Celgene had bumped the price up to about $8,000 a month. When he took his last month's worth of pills in April 2016, the sticker price had reached $10,691. By last March, the list price had reached $16,691.
Revlimid appears to have caught the attention of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar who used it as an example Wednesday — without naming it outright — of how some drug's prices rise with impunity. He said the copay for the average senior taking the drug rose from $115 to about $690 per month in the last year.
Celgene can keep raising the price of Revlimid because the drug has no competition. It's been around for more than a decade and its original patent expires next year. But today it looks like another four years could pass with no generic competitor to Revlimid.
"Prices like this are bad for patients," said Mitchell, who last year founded the nonprofit advocacy group Patients for Affordable Drugs. "They hurt patients."
Celgene has kept generic competition at bay by constructing an almost impenetrable fortress of patents and grants of market exclusivity around Revlimid, and its sister drug Thalomid, while also taking steps to ensure that generic competitors can't get their hands on enough of the drugs to develop viable alternatives.
"By preventing generic entry, Celgene has been able to
