We talk a lot about why H.R. 3 is bad—but you don’t have to take our word for it. In today’s new episode of the I am BIO Podcast, players across the drug development ecosystem—innovators, investors, patients—explain exactly how price controls would hurt patients and future cures.
H.R. 3 “would essentially freeze up funding sources for small biotechs nationwide,” says BIO President and CEO Dr. Michelle McMurry-Heath. “The proposal gives Medicare the power to dictate the prices companies can charge for drugs and would require drug manufacturers to accept prices that other countries pay.”
These include small biotechs like Pieris Pharmaceuticals—which is working on a new class of medicines called Anticalin proteins to treat cancer and deadly respiratory disorders.
“Like many other biotechnology companies, we don’t have drugs that we sell yet,” explains Ahmed Mousa, SVP and Head of Business Development at Pieris. “All of the drugs that we’re working on are either in clinical trials or in preclinical development, which means that we rely entirely on investors to help power our research and development activities.”
But H.R. 3 could lead to “less investors in the space,” he says, meaning less funding, fewer biotechs, and smaller budgets for the ones that remain, “allowing them to work on less programs.”
“But a second and even maybe more unfortunate consequence of this is that the companies that do survive are probably going to be working on therapies that take lower levels of risk, meaning less breakthrough innovations and the smaller benefit for patients,” continues Mousa.
“At the end of the day, it may mean that patients will have fewer choices,” adds Michele Oshman, VP for External Affairs at BIO and Executive Director of the Council of State Bioscience Associations. “Cutting the innovator's ability to recoup R&D costs, and so limiting that reimbursement for medicines, is going to result in fewer medicines.”
The episode also features insights from a life science entrepreneur, an investor, as well as families of patients who would be directly impacted—and all agree that while H.R. 3 is tackling an important problem (access to medicines), the method will do far more harm than good.
The episode is available now on Apple, Google, and Spotify—listen, rate, review, and subscribe!
You can help fight dangerous drug price controls. Visit www.SaveCures.com to contact your Members of Congress and tell them why H.R. 3 will harm patients and future cures.
