Call for Medicaid formularies to block Gilead’s $1,000 per pill hepatitis drug

In a series of letters to be sent to state Medicaid directors starting this week, Michael Weinstein, president of the US consumer advocacy group AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), will ask the state directors to block biotech major Gilead Sciences (Nasdaq: GILD) new hepatitis C drug Sovaldi (sofosbuvir) from inclusion on their respective state Medicaid and other drug formularies.

The drug was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration last month (The Pharma Letter December 8, 2013) and Gilead immediately announced that it would price the drug at $84,000 for a 12-week course of treatment - or $1,000 per tablet - making it one of the most expensive drugs ever marketed, the AHF argues. Suggested treatment guidelines also require that Sovaldi be used with another drug, ribavirin (a nucleoside inhibitor), further adding to the cost of the prohibitively expensive course of treatment. Analysts have projected that Sovaldi will achieve sales of $1.9 billion in 2014 and as much as $6.6 billion in 2016.

Spurs debate over drug prices