By Matthew Chun
In recent months, generative artificial intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm. AI systems like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion have captured the imagination of the masses with their impressive and sometimes controversial ability to generate human-like text and artwork. However, it may come as a surprise to some that — in addition to writing Twitter threads and dating app messages — AI is also well underway in revolutionizing the discovery of life-saving drugs.
By Abe Sutton
While the Most Favored Nation (MFN) Interim Final Rule (IFR) advances a well-calibrated policy to standardize pharmaceutical prices across developed nations, procedurally, its issuance was a mistake.
The Trump administration would have been wiser to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for two reasons: first, an NPRM would have circumvented some of the procedural vulnerabilities of the IFR. And second, had the Trump administration issued an NPRM, President-Elect Biden’s team would have faced significant pressure to finalize the policy.
In this post, I touch on what MFN is, examine why the interim final rule is legally vulnerable, explore why the Biden team likely would have adopted the policy had an NPRM been issued, and explain how industry should think about this situation.
By Fred Ledley, Ekaterina Cleary, and Matthew Jackson [1]
“I am disposed to ask: “Does teaching consist in putting questions?” Indeed, the secret of your system has just this instant dawned upon me.”
Socrates in Oeconomicus (Economics) by Xenophon
The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed longstanding debates about the role of the public and private sectors in drug discovery and development from questions of optimal policy to questions of life and death. On one hand, it has dramatically demonstrated the public’s dependence on biopharmaceutical companies for the discovery, development, manufacture, and distribution of drugs and vaccines that may quell the pandemic. On the other hand, the billions of dollars of public funding demanded by the private sector to pursue these products vividly illustrates the industry’s reliance on public funding for the development of products that address the public’s most pressing needs.