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Advanz Pharma, alongside London-based private equity firms Cinven and HgCapital, is collectively confronted with an £84 million penalty for inflating the price of the thyroid drug by over 1,000 per cent, soaring from £20 to £248 per package over an eight-year period. The Competition Appeal Tribunal endorsed 'all key aspects' of the Competition and Markets Authority's verdict on the companies' culpability in the case, the CMA has said. Advanz stood as the sole supplier of liothyronine tablets, essential for treating thyroid hormone deficiency, with the cost of a packet of these tablets surging over 12-fold between 2009 and 2017. Although Advanz Pharma currently possesses ownership of the company, its former owners, PE firms Cinven and HgCapital, also bear responsibility for the imposed fine, the CMA said. "NHS annual spending on the tablets in 2006, the year before the implementation of the strategy, was £600,000, but by 2009 had increased to more than £2.3 million and jumped to more than £30 million by 2016," Britain's competition watchdog said.

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."