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How Soon Could President Biden Enable Generic Competition to Xtandi? Very Quickly, If There Is the Will.

By James Love

On March 21, 2023, the NIH, acting on behalf of HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, rejected a petition from four cancer patients asking HHS to use the government’s rights in the prostate cancer drug enzalutamide, in order to remedy pricing abuses by the patent holder. The abuse is charging U.S. cancer patients two to six times as much as other high income countries for Astellas’ and Pfizer’s Xtandi, a drug invented on federal grants.

The cancer patients could seek a remedy to the abusive and discriminatory pricing because the U.S. government had funded the R&D for each of the three patented inventions that are currently blocking generic competition.

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