Valeant’s $3,500 Sticker On Siliq Could Trigger A Pricing War With Lilly, Novartis

Written by Tracy Staton (FiercePharma.com)

Valeant Pharmaceuticals (VRX), one of the most obvious price-hiking offenders of the last couple of years, has just unveiled the sticker on its new psoriasis drug, Siliq—and it’s the lowest in the market for next-gen meds.

At least that’s what Valeant said Friday in announcing a $3,500-per-month list price for the med, acquired from AstraZeneca (AZN) and approved by the FDA earlier this year. Makes sense, too, given that Siliq will be going up against first-to-market Cosentyx, one of Novartis’ (NVS) most successful launches, and Taltz, rolled out by Eli Lilly (LLY) in 2016.

Valeant’s in-class rivals haven’t publicly quoted hard numbers on their drugs, which are IL-17 blockers, a new type of therapy competing with the long-established TNF-alpha drugs, including as AbbVie’s dominant Humira and Amgen’s Enbrel. Novartis did say in launching Cosentyx that it would be priced “on par” with Johnson & Johnson’s IL-12/IL-23 inhibitor, Stelara, which ran about $7,661 per injection at the time, or about $46,000 for the initial year of therapy. At $3,500 per month, Siliq’s annual cost would be $42,000.

Of course, list prices aren’t the net prices to payers. Those are negotiated, with rebates and discounts that cut into retail cost considerably these days. And with multiple competitors in a particular class, payers have the opportunity to pit rival drugmakers against each other for better deals. To wit, Novartis negotiated an exclusive formulary deal with Express Scripts for 2017, leaving Eli Lilly’s med out in the cold.

Valeant has another reason to undercut its rivals on Siliq, too. The drug’s FDA-approved label includes a black-box warning, the agency’s most serious, noting that Siliq patients have “completed suicides.” The drug also comes with a risk-management program—or REMS—that “appears onerous,” Evercore ISI analyst Umer Raffat wrote when the med was approved.