Earlier this month two people from Biogen, a firm that creates medical drugs to help treat various medical conditions, came to discuss the medical and business sides of creating a new treatment called Spinraza. Spinraza is a drug that is used to treat Spinal Muscular Atrophy(SMA) which is a rare genetic linked condition that causes a loss of nerve cells inside of the spinal cord. This loss of nerve cells causes a loss of motor function and can often be lethal, especially when the age of onset is earlier. Spinraza has been approved for sale very recently and was approved by the Federal Drug Administration(FDA) very quickly for a drug, in only five years. The actual approval came from the FDA in only four months instead of eight to twelve
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Everything from pricing of the product to marketing the product is interwoven. The speakers explained that it is very expensive to make the drug, so getting a return on the investment makes pricing the drug complicated. It is hard to predict how many users of the drug there will be because it is rare and finding out if insurance companies will approve paying for the treatment is difficult as well. Beyond this, the United States healthcare system is extremely complex which makes selling the product even harder. Data as recent as last week shows that sales of Spinraza is not growing at the rate that Biogen analysts had predicted. The analysts predicted that sales would be about $381.55 million, but the sales were only $364 million.(1). Some of the reasons associated with this was that the amount of patients that are getting the drug has not risen at the rate that was expected and that the drug is not reaching as many adult patients as expected which is the largest group in the United States of those with Spinal Muscular Atrophy. This is interesting as a business student as the speakers shared how complicated it was to figure out how to price the drug, and market to the various groups. During the presentation one woman in the crowd spoke of her own brother’s difficulty
Everything from pricing of the product to marketing the product is interwoven. The speakers explained that it is very expensive to make the drug, so getting a return on the investment makes pricing the drug complicated. It is hard to predict how many users of the drug there will be because it is rare and finding out if insurance companies will approve paying for the treatment is difficult as well. Beyond this, the United States healthcare system is extremely complex which makes selling the product even harder. Data as recent as last week shows that sales of Spinraza is not growing at the rate that Biogen analysts had predicted. The analysts predicted that sales would be about $381.55 million, but the sales were only $364 million.(1). Some of the reasons associated with this was that the amount of patients that are getting the drug has not risen at the rate that was expected and that the drug is not reaching as many adult patients as expected which is the largest group in the United States of those with Spinal Muscular Atrophy. This is interesting as a business student as the speakers shared how complicated it was to figure out how to price the drug, and market to the various groups. During the presentation one woman in the crowd spoke of her own brother’s difficulty