Biosimilars And Reference Biotechnologic Drugs: Comparison Of The Biosimilars’ Effect On Reference Drug’s Price For EU, USA And Turkey

Abstract

The use of biotechnology-derived products has increased over the last years. In this regard, biosimilars are considered as an alternative to decrease the total biologic drugs cost for countries. To investigate biosimilars cost saving effect on pharmaceutical budget, our research question was based on whether there are considerable price differences between between biosimilar and reference biotechnological product. Considering the probable price differences between biosimilar and reference drug, substitution of biosimilars with reference drugs are expected to result in relatively lower price differences compared to price differences between generic and original conventional drugs. In this regard, in this study, it was aimed to analyze the price differences between biosimilar and reference biotechnology drugs in Europe, USA and Turkey. A systematic literature review was performed by using keywords of ¨Biosimilars Pricing Europe¨, ¨Biosimilars Pricing USA¨ and ¨Biosimilars Pricing Turkey¨ in Pubmed. For Turkey, there was lack of literature with these keywords. Therefore an analysis was made using the local prices of biosimilar drugs whose reference products are also being reimbursed in Turkey. In light of the systematic literature review, the price differences between biosimilar and reference drugs were changed between 0.51% and -38% in Europe. Price differences were found to be between +0.53% and -39.60% in Turkey. As the first biosimilar drug in USA was registered in April 2015, there was lack of literature based on real data with the keywords used in this study. But the price differences assumptions for USA were close to the numbers observed in studies based on EU markets. Although the price difference between biosimilar and reference biotechnological product is relatively lower compared to the conventional drugs, which can be up to 80%, price differences in EU countries, with only by the competition of biosimilar and biotechnology drugs, cost savings could be more than 10 billion $.