Posted by Michael Wonder on 18 Nov 2019
Funding orphan medicinal products beyond price: sustaining an ecosystem
18 November 2019 - Following a similar legislation in the USA, the EU passed a legislation in 1999 to incentivise the development of an ecosystem around orphan medicinal products.
In the last few years, there has been increasing debate about the strength of such incentives and whether the legislation needed to be reviewed to re-balance what is perceived to be an unfair situation.
Most of the debate has been fuelled by what is perceived to be an excessive cost per individual of orphan medicinal products and the policy and political implications of funding these therapies in the advent of increasing personalised medicine, i.e., the ability to target therapies to small populations determined by a biomarker that can otherwise be considered orphan.
