12/28/2023 0 Comments Horizon therapeutics ceoIts payments to physicians for things like consulting, speeches, and meals totaled $8.7 million in 2021, compared with the $10 million it paid them for research, federal records show. To help sell its drugs, Horizon blankets specialist physicians with marketing and peer-to-peer appeals. Subscribe to KFF Health News' free Morning Briefing. Justice officials did not respond to requests for comment on the investigations. The company this year disclosed a third probe, concerning methods the company allegedly used to get prior authorization of its drugs. Those investigations appear to be no longer active, Horizon spokesperson Catherine Riedel said. A separate probe opened in 2019 over alleged kickbacks to pharmacy benefit managers, companies that negotiate to get Horizon’s drugs covered by insurers. Walbert’s company has been particularly adept at ensuring that insurers, rather than patients, bear the costly burdens of his drugs.Ī federal prosecutor in 2015 began examining allegations that Horizon’s patient assistance program had worked with specialty pharmacies to evade insurers’ efforts to shun Horizon’s expensive drugs. He’s done this with unusual finesse - courting patients with concierge-like attention and engaging specialist clinicians with lunches, conferences, and research projects, all while touting his own experience as a patient with a rare inflammatory disease. Horizon’s CEO, Tim Walbert, who will reportedly get around $135 million when the deal closes, has mastered a particular kind of industry expertise: taking drugs invented and tested by other people, wrapping them expertly in hard-nosed marketing and warm-hued patient relations, raising their prices, and enjoying astounding revenues. Amgen announced in December that it intends to buy Horizon for $27.8 billion, in the biggest pharmaceutical industry deal announced in 2022. Krystexxa was just one of the many shiny objects that attracted Amgen, a pharmaceutical giant. Horizon’s strategy has paid off handsomely. Yet the company has managed to assemble a war chest of lucrative drugs, in the process writing a playbook for how to build a modern pharmaceutical colossus.Īs the White House and both parties in Congress grapple with reining in prescription drug prices, Horizon’s approach reveals just how difficult this may be. Krystexxa brought in $716 million in 2022 and was expected to earn $1 billion annually in coming years.Īlthough Horizon says it now has 20 drugs under development, in its 15 years of existence it has yet to license a product it invented. Two years later, a young company now called Horizon Therapeutics bought Crealta and its drug portfolio for $510 million.Įven at that price, it proved a good deal. In 2013, Savient was sold at auction to Crealta, a private equity venture created for the purpose, for $120 million. But the small biotech company never recovered. That danger signal would disappear in later studies, and the FDA approved pegloticase, under the trade name Krystexxa, two years later. The day after Sundy’s talk, the stock price of Savient Pharmaceuticals, which developed the drug with Duke scientists, plunged 75%. In about half of those who had taken it, the drug melted away the crystalline uric acid deposits that encrusted their joints to cause years of pain, immobility, or disfigurement.īut Sundy also disclosed an unsettling detail: In one clinical trial, patients who got the drug were more likely to develop heart problems than those who didn’t. John Sundy proudly announced that pegloticase, a drug he’d helped develop, was astoundingly effective at treating severe gout, which affects perhaps 50,000 Americans. It can be republished for free.Īt the American College of Rheumatology’s annual meeting in 2008, Duke University’s Dr.
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