“It was frustrating to see some of the D.C. political maneuvering,” Dr. Edgerton says. “Although the patient access and cost savings potential of biosimilars should be a bipartisan issue, the Democrat members of the committee did not focus on the topic of the committee meeting, but instead talked off-topic on their opposition to the current administration’s funding cuts to various government agencies. This was not in keeping with the testimony or expertise of the witnesses,” he notes.
The hearing also included testimonies from Debra Pratt, MD, a breast cancer oncologist in Austin, Texas, and president of the Community Oncology Alliance; Craig Burton, executive director of the Biosimilars Council, which is a division of the Association for Accessible Medicines; and Aaron Kesselheim, MD, professor of medicine at Harvard University and director of the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
More information about the hearing and a video of the proceedings are available online.
Vanessa Caceres is a medical writer in Bradenton, Fla.
