A US drug pricing watchdog has raised the range by which it thinks Pfizer’s heart muscle disease drug tafamidis, marketed as Vyndamax and Vyndaqel, should be priced annually, but it’s still recommending an 85% to 95% cut, according to a final analysis released this week.
The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) wrote that the price benchmark for tafamidis, a transthyretin stabilizing agent, should range between $13,600 to $39,000 annually. This final recommendation comes with a higher price than ICER previously released in July, when the organization set the limits between $8,500 and $36,000 per year. Pfizer’s current annual list price is almost $200,000.
In a statement to Endpoints News, a Pfizer representative wrote that “the use of QALY as a [clinical effectiveness] measure is well established, however, in rare diseases, this poses some challenges and bias particularly against elderly populations suffering from serious diseases who have a shorter life expectancy and less time to benefit from treatment.”
The drug first won approval in 2019, making it the first in the class of drugs to be approved for transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy (ATTR-CM), although other competitors are making their way through the development process, like BridgeBio’s acoramidis, which has a PDUFA date set for late November, and Alnylam’s RNA silencing agent Amvuttra (vutrisiran), which was just submitted for an sNDA to the FDA this month.
The final price range for Pfizer covers tafamidis and acoramidis, but not Amvuttra “because of the timing of new information on vutrisiran and lack of data needed for modeling,” ICER said.