Jim Edwards Has Done A Nice Job On The AHF v. Isentress® Pricing Controversy Story

Over at b|Net Pharma, Jim Edwards (that's him, at right) has a very well-put-together narrative on the controversy surrounding Merck's less-than-transparent US pricing strategy for Isentress^®, the clearly life-saving, best-in-class AIDS drug (which is often prescribed in combination with a cocktail of other drugs -- so that the annual bill for US patients runs close to $22,000). He actually picked up on this story, from my earlier piece -- and then, after some solid probing and skeptical quesitoning from him (via back-channel e-mail), I fed him several packets of additional material (all long "hidden in plain sight" -- in the public record) for his, thus -- do go read it all:

. . . .So which is it? HIV activists want to know. If it’s a first-line drug, why hasn’t price competition set in, as it did with another HIV drug, Crixivan, which Merck launched at a discount to competitors?

There are two reasons that hasn’t happened. First, in 2008, when it was still a salvage therapy, Merck generously announced that it would freeze the price of Isentress until December 2010. At the time, that sounded reasonable — Isentress is a new type of anti-retroviral, an "integrase inhibitor," the first of its kind, and patients were hopeful that it would be a success.

It was too successful, as it turned out. . . .

"Good on ya'," Jim. Do go read all of his.