The lead drug pric­ing ne­go­tia­tor at the White House said the over­ar­ch­ing goal of TrumpRx is to im­prove price trans­paren­cy, not to be a large mar­ket­place for dis­count­ed med­i­cines.

Chris Klomp, head of Medicare and chief coun­selor to HHS Sec­re­tary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., on Thurs­day tamped down ex­pec­ta­tions for the White House’s di­rect-to-con­sumer med­i­cines hub when asked at a STAT News event how many Amer­i­cans he hopes to reach.

“TrumpRx right now is a cash-pay-on­ly mar­ket,” Klomp said. “And so the goal was not ac­tu­al­ly some mas­sive reach.”

The FDA is seek­ing feed­back ahead of a pub­lic meet­ing this sum­mer to eval­u­ate the progress of a vouch­er pi­lot that has so far ac­cel­er­at­ed four drug ap­provals.

Cre­at­ed last June, the Com­mis­sion­er's Na­tion­al Pri­or­i­ty Vouch­er pi­lot looks to shave months off of new drug and bi­o­log­ic re­views if they align with sev­er­al strate­gic pri­or­i­ties, such as meet­ing un­met med­ical needs or in­creas­ing af­ford­abil­i­ty through pric­ing. The agency last Ju­ly said it sought to award up to five vouch­ers, but to date, the agency has award­ed 18 vouch­ers and grant­ed four ap­provals.

On Fri­day, the FDA an­nounced a pub­lic hear­ing on the pi­lot for June 12. The agency said in a Fed­er­al Reg­is­ter no­tice that it wants in­put on el­i­gi­bil­i­ty cri­te­ria, the vouch­er se­lec­tion process, spon­sor re­spon­si­bil­i­ties, FDA re­view pro­ce­dures and pro­gram im­ple­men­ta­tion.

→ Sr­ishti Gup­ta took over as CEO of Idor­sia last sum­mer, but the job is open again as chair­man Jean-Paul Clozel kicks off an­oth­er search. Idor­sia’s shares dropped more than 13% on the Swiss ex­change when the news broke on Mon­day. Gup­ta was called up from the board of di­rec­tors to re­place An­dré Muller, who re­tired in Ju­ly 2025 af­ter just a year in the top spot. Dur­ing Muller’s brief tenure, Idor­sia came up emp­ty on a pro­posed li­cens­ing deal for Tryvio, but the FDA gave the green light for its up­dat­ed la­bel, say­ing the blood pres­sure med­i­cine didn’t need a REMS re­quire­ment.

No­var­tis will spend $2 bil­lion up­front to buy a more se­lec­tive PI3Kα in­hibitor, in­ten­si­fy­ing the com­pe­ti­tion to de­vel­op a n