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The UK pharmaceutical industry experienced a substantial increase in public trust and favourability during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a new poll. This trend appears to be persisting with the study showing a generally favourable view of the sector. The recent survey, conducted by Ipsos and commissioned by Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI), represents the third instalment in a series that began in 2021. This ongoing study targets members of the public, healthcare professionals, and parliamentarians. The study once again underscored a favourable perception of the sector with 67 per cent of respondents recognising that the pharmaceutical industry produces safe and effective medicines using cutting-edge technologies. Moreover, a majority agrees that it is a highly innovative field. Seven out of 10 people also trust the sector's readiness to address future pandemics, even as media attention on pharmaceutical companies returns to pre-pandemic levels. However, concerns arise regarding limitations in accessing new medicines due to cost pressures.

The Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee (PSNC) has challenged price concessions imposed by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) on some of the medicines. It has raised concerns on the process for setting price concessions to senior government officials responsible for medicines supply, warning that the system is not working in the current environment from a community pharmacy contractor perspective. "When a new government takes over next week, this will be one of several urgent topics being raised by PSNC to new ministers, alongside the fuel price crisis, inflationary pressures and winter pressures on pharmacy businesses," said PSNC. The final update to August price concessions was announced yesterday taking the total concessions granted to a record 138 for August. PSNC said: "Of those, 99 were in line with PSNC requests, but prices for 39 lines were imposed by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC): those impositions do not match the purchase prices reported by contractors and the evidence of market prices which we passed on to DHSC. In particular, the final imposed prices of Apriprazole and Temazepam tablets has generated a lot of concern amongst contractors due to the large variation between their reimbursement prices and purchase prices during the month of August."

The Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee has announced that the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has granted final price concessions to further items for the month of October 2021. This is the fourth list of price concessions for the month. Contractors can find information on the first two batches of price concessions here, and learn about the process involved on PSNC's website. A price concession only applies for the month in which it is granted. No additional prescription endorsement are required as the new price is automatically applied by the NHS BSA to all items submitted for payment in the same month for which a price concession is granted. PSNC is still working with the DHSC to agree further concessionary prices on other drugs reported to be unavailable at the stated October 2021 Drug Tariff price. Check Pharmacy business website for the price concession lists.

Any prescription for Promethazine hydrochloride 10mg tablets x 56 submitted for payment to the NHSBSA for July 2022 will be reimbursed at the new price of £17.77 not as per the price concession of £13.45 announced in the 4th concessions update published on 29 July 2022, said the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee (PSNC). In July 2022, PSNC received several reports from contractors unable to obtain Promethazine hydrochloride 10mg tablets (56) at the published Drug Tariff price of £4.24. Therefore, it submitted a request for a price concession, which was granted and subsequently published but this was later withdrawn after confirmation from the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) that due to the price change mechanism, the reimbursement price for Promethazine hydrochloride 10mg tablets has increased from £4.24 to £17.77 for July 2022. PSNC said, "Following the price change mechanism rules, for generic drugs (excluding drugs in Category M), a price change up to and including the 8th of the month takes effect for prescriptions dispensed in that same month. Any price change after the 8th takes place in the following month."

Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has updated the final price concessions for June 2023, following a discussion by Community Pharmacy England regarding medicine pricing issues reported by pharmacy owners (its members). A price concession only applies for the month it is granted; any prices agreed for concessions requested late in the month will roll over into the following month. Community Pharmacy England encouraged pharmacies to report any problems obtaining a Part VIII product at or below the stated Drug Tariff price, using the online feedback form on the Community Pharmacy England website along with full details of the supplier and price paid for any products sourced above the Drug Tariff price. The association will investigate the extent of the problem and, if appropriate, discuss the issue with DHSC.

The Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee (PSNC) has raised concerns over the impact that high medicine price rises are having on contractor. Recently, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has granted the final list of price concessions for December 2022. The latest additions bring the total number of concessionary prices granted for the month of December to 198, surpassing the previous record of 159 granted in September 2022. PSNC has heard from hundreds of community pharmacy contractors who are paying inflated prices for antibiotics used for the treatment of Strep A and who have rightly been concerned about the lack of certainty around the final reimbursement prices for these medicines. It added: "We welcomed the involvement of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to look into the pricing of antibiotics. But the number of reports we are getting from contractors about medicines price rises are just not acceptable and this goes far beyond the antibiotic crisis."

Sun Pharma has announced that it will acquire all outstanding shares of Concert Pharmaceuticals through a tender offer for an upfront payment of $8.00 per share of common stock in cash, or $576 million in equity value. The upfront payment of $8.00 per share of common stock in cash represents a premium of approximately 33% to Concert's 30-day volume weighted average price as of January 18, 2023, the last trading day prior to today's announcement. Concert is a late-stage biotechnology company pioneering the use of deuterium in medicinal chemistry. Concert has an extensive patent portfolio, including its lead product candidate deuruxolitinib - an oral inhibitor of Janus kinases JAK1 and JAK2 for the treatment of Alopecia Areata, an autoimmune dermatological disease - which is in late-stage development. It has completed the evaluation of the efficacy and safety of deuruxolitinib in adult patients with moderate to severe Alopecia Areata in its THRIVE-AA Phase 3 clinical program and two open label, long-term extension studies are ongoing in North America and Europe. Sun Pharma's immediate focus would be to follow Concert's plan to submit a New Drug Application (NDA) to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the first half of 2023.

Pharmaceutical companies AbbVie and Eli Lilly have withdrawn from Britain's voluntary medicines pricing agreement, an industry body said on Monday. Companies are increasingly arguing that it is no longer possible to justify the UK's "voluntary scheme" to global boardrooms and investors as repayment rates in 2023 have surged to 26.5 per cent of revenue, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) said in a statement. "The current scheme has harmed innovation, with costs spiralling out of control, and the UK falling behind other major countries to be left as a global outlier," said Laura Steele, president and general manager for Eli Lilly's Northern Europe division. ABPI said it was seeking early talks with the government to set out a new future settlement. In December, the industry body had said the government raised the amount manufacturers of branded medicines within the voluntary scheme will be required to return to almost £3.3 billion in sales revenue from an earlier amount of £1.8 billion.

Dr Bharat Shah CBE regrets that neither community pharmacists nor pharmaceutical wholesalers in the UK have any control over how Category M reimbursement prices in Part VIII A of the Drug Tariff are determined. The co-founder and chief executive of Sigma Pharmaceuticals was speaking at a conference organised by Avicenna in West London on Sunday (March 6). Introduced into the Drug Tariff in April 2005, Category M is used to set the reimbursement prices of over 500 drugs. The Department of Health and Social Care makes the final decision on the amount of reimbursement (cost of drugs and appliances supplied against an NHS prescription form) and remuneration (fees paid as part of the NHS community pharmacy contract for the provision of a service).

The Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) has upheld the Competition and Markets Authority's (CMA) findings against two pharmaceutical manufacturers who consistently overcharged hydrocortisone tablets for over a decade. Auden/Actavis UK's pricing for the critical medicine 'hydrocortisone' from 2008 to 2018 constituted an abuse of their dominant market position, leading to fines nearing £130 million, CMA said in a statement. "These companies increased the price of this crucial medicine by over 10,000 per cent, soaring from 70p to £72 within that period. These are the highest ever CMA penalties upheld by the Tribunal," the CMA said. In July 2021, the CMA imposed fines exceeding £265 million on hydrocortisone manufacturers Auden Mckenzie and Actavis UK, which acquired Auden's business in 2015 and subsequently became Accord-UK. The fines were imposed for abuse of dominance and collusion by both the parent companies and potential competitors. The recent verdict, announced on September 18, comes five weeks after the Tribunal supported the CMA's decision in a separate case regarding the pricing of medicines supplied to the NHS. In that prior case, fines amounted to £84 million.

Britain's competition watchdog has fined pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Flynn £63 million and £6.7 million respectively for allegedly breaking competition law and illegally profiting from the sale of an anti-epilepsy drug. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found that the two companies colluded to sell phenytoin sodium capsules, previously known as Epanutin, at "unfairly high prices" for over four over years between 2012 and 2016. The annual costs of the capsules for the NHS increased from £2 million in 2012 to approximately £50 million the following year. CMA has accused Pfizer of charging, over four years, prices between 780 per cent and 1,600 per cent higher than what was fixed previously for the medicine used to prevent life-threatening epileptic seizures. Pfizer supplied the drug to Flynn, which then sold the capsules on to wholesalers and pharmacies at a price between 2,300 per cent and 2,600 per cent higher than the prices previously charged by Pfizer.

The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) on Thursday (February 2) called for the government to scrap its plans to raise the repayment rates for drugmakers, to avoid possible setbacks in the sector. Drugmakers that are part of the government's voluntary scheme agreement, which makes branded medicines affordable for people, are required to pay a part of their drug revenue to the government. The Department of Health and Social Care plans to raise the revenue clawback rate to 27.5 per cent from 24.5 per cent. The country's ongoing attempt to raise rates is likely to send the "worst possible signal" to global investors and boardrooms, said the ABPI. "Hiking these clawbacks to such uncompetitive levels risks undermining the UK's offer to global life sciences companies," Richard Torbett, chief executive of the ABPI, said in a statement. Pharmaceuticals giants AbbVie and Eli Lilly withdrew from the UK's voluntary drug pricing agreement in January after the repayment rates surged to 26.5 per cent.

The Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee (PSNC) has expressed its concerns over sustained pressures on medicines supply that are having a very serious impact on community pharmacy teams and their patients. It has asked contractors and their teams to continue using its regular reporting tools to help them demonstrate the scale of the problems to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and to support escalations as needed. The committee said: "The sustained increases in price concessions that we have seen so far in 2022 - with more than 100 concessions being granted in some months - show no signs of abating, and we know that many pharmacies now find themselves in a critical situation trying to source medicines in timely manner and facing significant financial risk due to greater uncertainty around expected reimbursement prices for a large number of medicines." "We know that some concessions being imposed by the Department do not match contractors' experience on the ground, and we would ask all contractors to continue reporting pricing issues to us on a regular basis to support our representations: Report product over Drug Tariff price."

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has published the full text of the 2024 voluntary scheme for branded medicines pricing, access and growth (VPAG). The 2024 VPAG agreement text sets out the detailed terms of the agreement reached between DHSC, NHS England and the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) to support patient access to medicines, the financial sustainability of the NHS and the UK life sciences sector. The new voluntary scheme will come into force on 1 January 2024, following expiry of the 2019 Voluntary Scheme and shall remain in force for a period of five years, until 31 December 2028. Manufacturers or suppliers of branded medicines to the NHS have been given time till 15 January 2024 to decide whether to join the new 2024 Voluntary Scheme, or default to the updated Statutory Scheme.

The Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee (PSNC) has rejected Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and NHS England's proposal on price concessions reform and relief measures to ease pressure on pharmacies. The Committee called the proposal 'insufficient' to meet the sector's needs considering the impact of the current crisis, reflecting on the economic pressures that accelerated through the autumn and winter. The Ministers and other decision-makers have shown their interest in the potential role of community pharmacy, particularly in using a Pharmacy First approach and making use of PGDs and the skills of independent prescribers. But the Committee had made clear to them that without new money this is all a pipedream. "We need an urgent injection of funds into the sector, otherwise we will continue to see a degradation of services and eventual collapse of the network. The Committee is clear that there is no further place for warm words while pharmacy collapses," said PSNC. The Committee reflected that the 5-year CPCF agreement had been based on working together to create the capacity and context necessary to deliver the shift towards greater service delivery. Not only has that capacity-release not happened due to slow progress by Government, but pharmacies have also been burdened with these additional, and insurmountable, challenges.

The British Generic Medicines Association (BGMA) has called for exemption from the Voluntary Scheme for Branded Medicines Pricing and Access (VPAS), an agreement between the UK Government, NHS England, and the pharmaceutical industry for branded generics and biosimilars. "Due to the rising rate of VPAS on top of existing competition, manufacturers are finding the additional levy economically unviable given their already low prices," the association said. According to research by the Office of Health Economics OHE and Professor Alistair McGuire (LSE) the rising rate of VPAS will force manufacturers pull out of the market which may lead to prices rise due to a lack of competition and critical savings to the NHS will be lost. The new study stated that Government levy on medicines designed to increase access to new treatments and promote affordability could actually be denying the NHS billions of pounds of annual savings due to the impact it is having on branded generics and biosimilars.

The Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee (PSNC)'s members are seeking immediate rescue packages for the sector to help with energy bills and to ease capacity constraints. In a meeting held on 14th and 15th September, the committee members expressed their anger and frustration on the reluctance of NHS England and government to fund pharmacy sustainably. The meeting was held to consider practical steps to ease the pressures on the community pharmacy sector, and to oversee the progress of negotiations on the Community Pharmacy Contractual Framework (CPCF) and other work. Committee members, as pharmacy contractors, shared their experiences of the current pressures on all contractors, including the inability to deliver some services and to maintain core service levels; the capacity and workforce crises facing the sector; the critical need for funding support this winter; and the urgent need for Government to adapt the Price Concessions system to meet the needs of contractors. "The Price Concessions system is no longer working for contractors in the current volatile medicine supply environment and PSNC is clear this is not acceptable," said the committee.

The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) has proposed a Voluntary Scheme for Pricing, Access and Growth (VPAG) that aims to deliver a sustainable approach to medicines provision and maximise the growth potential of the UK life sciences industry. It has published the industry's vision for a new agreement with the government which will deliver for patients, the NHS and the economy. VPAG also includes measures to ensure rapid patient access and adoption of new medicines, as well as opportunities to improve health outcomes and productivity for the whole country. The association's proposals consist of four key areas: restoring an internationally competitive commercial environment for life sciences; supporting UK clinical research and R&D; ensuring rapid patient access and uptake of new medicines; and improving population health and productivity through health innovation. The proposal would deliver over £1bn a year to the NHS - around £300m more than the average delivered under the old scheme before 2023, and comfortably more than the highest contributions ever made before the pandemic.

The government, NHS England and the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) has begun the negotiations for a new voluntary scheme for branded medicines pricing on Thursday (4 May). A new voluntary scheme is expected to take effect from 1 January 2024, replacing the current scheme which came into force in 2019 and ends on 31 December 2023 In their first meeting, the government, NHS England and industry - represented by the ABPI -expected to agree to a shared negotiation aim of working toward a mutually beneficial agreement that supports better patient outcomes and a healthier population, a financially sustainable NHS, and UK economic growth. Health Minister, Will Quince, said: "These negotiations will ensure a new scheme continues to deliver value for money by providing significant savings for our health services, securing access to innovative lifesaving drugs for NHS patients, and helping to reduce waiting times - one of the Prime Minister's 5 priorities. The current voluntary scheme supports investment in NHS services and saves billions of pounds for the NHS, while also promoting innovations and a successful life sciences sector.

New data on weight loss drugs that could compete with Novo Nordisk's Wegovy are raising expectations there will soon be more options, and possibly lower prices, in an estimated $100 billion marketplace, doctors and pharmaceutical executives say. Drugmakers are ratcheting up their research and aiming for new formulations that can be taken as pills, options to deliver higher weight loss or drugs that reduce fat while maintaining muscle. "It has really been an explosion of innovation," said Dr. Robert Gabbay, chief science officer at the American Diabetes Association (ADA), which receives funding from both Novo and Eli Lilly and Co and just concluded its annual meeting in San Diego, California. "If there are multiple (treatments) in the market, that will lead to some level of competition and greater access."