MFN Pricing Could Upend Drugmakers’ Cross-Border Deals (Law360)

A new program rolled out by the Trump administration that aims to decrease prescription drug prices in the US has been causing consternation among drug companies, which fear the resulting pricing uncertainty could gut licensing deals that were inked long before the program was even on the horizon. Goodwin Life Sciences and Healthcare partner, Heath R. Ingram, told Law360 that licensing deals caught up in the MFN pricing scheme are “a huge concern.” “If you execute license agreements or collaboration agreements and allow those other entities to set price for you in those countries, you have to rethink those relationships altogether because they may execute at a price, or they may set a price, that makes it untenable for you to have a viable US market approach. Or it may undermine your US pricing strategy,” he said. It’s not just in licensing deals that issues are arising, according to Ingram, who works with small and midsize drug companies that may only have one drug that treats a rare disease. “My clients, who are small, mid-sized companies that manufacture ultra-rare-disease products — they may only treat 10 or 15 patients in France or Spain,” Ingram added. “They’re actively modeling, ‘Is treating these 11 patients in this country worth jeopardizing our US pricing strategy because we only have one product on market?’ It’s a very challenging bioethical issue. For better or worse, for the past 30 years, Americans have subsidized the biomedical innovation for the entire globe,” Ingram said.