23 June 2019 - On May 27, the B.C. government announced a policy that will forcibly switch thousands of patients, effective Nov. 22, with serious, chronic conditions from their current biologic medicines to lower-cost “biosimilar” treatments.

The roughly 23,000 patients who will be affected include those with rheumatoid arthritis, plaque psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, diabetes, Crohn’s Disease and ulcerative colitis.

Such switches are widely accepted with generic versions of small-molecule drugs, which are identical copies of the originator medicine. But biosimilars, while highly similar to their reference products, are not identical.

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