CVS Announces Super Cheap Generic Alternative To EpiPen (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Pharmaceutical giant CVS announced Thursday that it has partnered with Impax Laboratories to sell a generic epinephrine auto-injector for $109.99 for a two-pack -- a dramatic cut from Mylan's Epipen two-pack prices, which list for more than $600 as a brand name and $300 as a generic. The lower-cost auto-injector, a generic form of Adrenaclick, is available starting today nationwide in the company's more than 9,600 pharmacies. Its price resembles that of EpiPen's before Mylan bought the rights to the life-saving devices back in 2007 and raised the price repeatedly, sparking outcry. Helena Foulkes, president of CVS Pharmacy, said the company felt compelled to respond to the urgent need for a more affordable alternative. "Over the past year, nearly 150,000 people signed on to a petition asking for a lower-cost epinephrine auto-injector option and millions more were active in social media searching for a solution," she said in a statement. The price of $109.99 for the alternative applies to those with and without insurance, CVS noted. And Impax is also offering a coupon to reduce the cost to just $9.99 for qualifying patients. Also in the press statement, Dr. Todd Listwa of Novant Health, a network of healthcare providers, noted the importance of access to epinephrine auto-injectors, which swiftly reverse rapid-onset, deadly allergic reactions in some. "For these patients, having access to emergency epinephrine is a necessity. Making an affordable epinephrine auto-injector device accessible to patients will ensure patients have the medicine they need, when they need it."

Comments

Former CVS pharmacist here

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm now clinical cardiac pharmacist, but I still follow the industry news.

This is a generic for the Adrenaclick, not the Epi-pen. It's the same drug but it not AB rated. It's easily fixable by a call from the filling pharmacist to the prescriber of they write for Epi-pen. We do it all the time.

Re:Former CVS pharmacist here

[guruevi]

For those of you who have no experience with the medical industry:

AB rating is to indicate the FDA considers this an equivalent substitute. There are currently at least 3 "EpiPen" systems on the market, EpiPen, Adrenaclick and Twinject and I think Auvi-Q is also entering the market again they all are auto-injectors giving 0.3 mg or 0.15 mg of Epinephrine, yet the FDA has rated these 'others' as BX meaning they cannot be interchanged (legally) without a brand new prescription even though they all do the same thing.

So yes, there are alternatives to the EpiPen but the medical industry has made sure that the consumer is not informed when the market breaks.

At least 20 years, sometimes more

[Shane_Optima]

the patent lasts like 5 or 10 or 20 years (I don't know)

Uh, it's 20 years, sometimes including an additional exclusivity period of up to 5 years (or apparently up to 10 years for certain antibiotics) offered by the FDA in some situations such that competitors' products will not be approved during that time. The exclusivity period isn't guaranteed to run consecutive to the patent period, although the drug companies obviously attempt to engineer it that way if possible.

I just thought that was worth clarifying. Like, "I'm don't recall if Joe was two or four or eight feet tall [and it turns out he might've been as much as twelve feet tall]"... that's not something you should hand-wave away. Yes, it's a complicated situation, but the government-created barriers to entry here (of which drug patents are just a tiny piece) are significant. We do need some barriers, obviously, along with some method of incentivization, but given the high or wildly fluctuating prices of some generics when there doesn't appear to be much of a marginal cost involved (I'm not necessarily saying that's the case with the epi-pens), the system as a whole does not appear to be functioning terribly well.