Presented by Cello Health BioConsulting, now part of Lumanity

Moderator:

  • Beth Fordham-Meier, CLP, VP, Business Development

Panelists:

  • Jeff Berkowitz, CEO and Director, Real Endpoints
  • Jeff Bockman, PhD, EVP, Head of Oncology Practice
  • Roger Longman, Founder and Chairman, Real Endpoints
  • Ed Saltzman, Executive Chairman

Oncology pricing and company valuations depend almost completely on its unique market access advantages. And those advantages have been magnified by an extraordinary 10-year economic boom.

A boom that COVID-19 has ended.

Cancer therapeutics have dominated the industry’s pipeline for just a few basic reasons: the unmet need is huge – and society’s visceral fear of the disease even greater; the government’s coverage rules are generous; and thanks to full-employment, employers haven’t demanded that payers use the kind of restrictions they use virtually everywhere else. And on that unique set of circumstances depends much of the industry’s valuation.

But what happens when that willingness to pay top-dollar prices for often incremental gains begins to waiver? Like when the entire US economy is in free fall?

In this Cello senior executive webinar, we’ll give a boardroom presentation, and take your questions, on cancer’s unique payer situation and its stability — or instability. Our focus: how the informed biotech executive team manages early (and late) clinical and commercial development to ensure success not just with the FDA but in what may be a very different and less favorable reimbursement environment.

Just to pick a couple of questions we’ll discuss:

  • Will payers and risk-sharing providers need tougher comparators to get better reimbursement (e.g., market-leading same-MoA competitors)?
  • Will therapies for early-stage cancers – potentially curative and cost-saving – get better relative reimbursement than those for late-stage therapies?
  • Will payers continue to reimburse around compendia … or will they adapt, as they have in non-oncology orphan indications, to restricting payment to narrower-than-label populations?
  • What kind of economic proxies will trials need to incorporate as endpoints?