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24 April, 2025 |
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Alexis Kramer |
Editor, Endpoints News
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by Andrew Dunn
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For the drug industry, President Donald Trump's tariffs haven't started to really hurt. At least not yet. On Thursday, several of the world’s largest pharma companies — Merck, Bristol Myers Squibb, Sanofi and Roche — reported quarterly earnings and shared their financial forecasts for the year. The message from the industry is that the
impact of the tariffs is real, but manageable. And the drugmakers were eager to position themselves as fully prepared for whatever may come next. “We have run all scenarios,” Sanofi CFO François-Xavier Roger said on a call with reporters Thursday. |
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by Nicole DeFeudis
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Merck CEO Rob Davis told investors on Thursday that he’s confident in the company’s ability to protect its top-selling product from the potential impacts of industry-specific tariffs. Without going into much detail on the implications of pharmaceutical tariffs threatened by the Trump administration, Davis
said during the company’s first-quarter earnings call that Merck is “as well-positioned on Keytruda as you can be.” Keytruda is Merck’s “biggest exposure” in the near term, but the company has “basically on-hand inventory in the United States to protect us through all of 2025,” with plans underway to prepare for 2026 and 2027, he said. “Obviously, we have to wait and see what the tariffs are, so I don't want to speak to the specific implications,” Davis said. “But I think we're positioned on
both Keytruda and the new products.” |
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Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images) |
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by Zachary Brennan
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The growing drug discount program for low-income Americans, known as the 340B program, has "transparency and oversight concerns" and needs to be reformed, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said in a sweeping new report released Thursday. The report is the result of an investigation that began in 2023 on how 340B operates, and it calls for wider congressional reforms to ensure 340B discounts translate to better access and lower costs for patients. Annual reporting on how hospitals' 340B revenue is used to ensure patient savings is among the transparency reforms Cassidy proposes. In response to Cassidy's inquiries from last September, the report states that Eli Lilly, Amgen and Johnson & Johnson said they've provided billions of dollars in discounts on drugs through 340B. All critiqued the program for parts of what it's become, although none called for the elimination of 340B. |
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by Max Bayer
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San Diego biotech Halozyme is suing Merck over an injectable version of its blockbuster cancer drug, alleging that the new formulation will infringe on Halozyme's under-the-skin delivery patents. The company alleged Thursday that subcutaneous Keytruda will infringe on patents that Halozyme filed beginning in 2011. Merck is set to hear back from the FDA on its
application for the product by the end of September and plans to launch this year, according to Halozyme. The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in New Jersey, follows through on a warning Halozyme issued last month. “Merck has long been aware of Halozyme's patents and still proceeded to appropriate Halozyme's technology in order to develop SC Keytruda," Halozyme
chief legal officer Mark Snyder said in a release. |
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