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Inflation has hit the pharmacy shelves.
The drug price inflation rate is expected to hit 3.8% next year, thanks largely to increased use of expensive medications like GLP-1s and cell and gene therapies, according to new data from healthcare services firm Vizient’s summer Pharmacy Market Outlook report.
Spending on semaglutide, Novo Nordisk’s GLP-1 (better known by its brand name, Wegovy), is up 77% this year compared to summer 2023, according to Vizient. And with the ever-expanding list of diseases GLP-1s could treat, spending on the drug class is “becoming increasingly significant for providers as they manage pharmacy spend,” the company said in a statement on July 30.
Cell and gene therapies, which treat diseases like sickle cell anemia and spinal muscular atrophy, cost anywhere from $250,000 to $4.3 million for one dose, according to Vizient. The company warned in the statement that providers should be prepared for these drugs to “significantly impact” their budgets, especially as the therapies are likely to become even more popular in the coming years, as nearly 300 are in clinical trials.
Another class of expensive drugs, called chimeric antigen receptor T-cell, or CAR-T therapies, are also driving up drug costs. Six CAR-T therapies approved to treat blood cancers all cost more than $455,000 per treatment, Vizient’s data shows.
“Gene and cell therapies present budgetary, operational, and revenue obstacles that require health systems’ multidisciplinary teams and processes to quickly identify qualified patients, access treatments, and synchronize logistics for drug administration,” Carina Dolan, associate VP of clinical oncology, pharmacoeconomics, and market insights at Vizient, said in the statement. “Providers should be organizing cross-functionally now to prepare for these novel therapeutics and planning a long-term approach to properly manage them.”