Policy, Finance Chris Morrison Policy, Finance Chris Morrison

Discount rates and drug value: A Q&A with Josh Cohen

All else being equal, people care more about outcomes that happen in the near future than about outcomes that happen later. The discount rate represents how much timing matters. We sit down with Josh Cohen, Deputy Director of the Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health (CEVR) at the Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts Medical Center, and Research Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, to learn about how changes to the discount rate can alter how we value medicines.

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Policy, Biotech Jessica Sagers Policy, Biotech Jessica Sagers

Toxic math: a British export that the US mustn’t import

It’s long been assumed that as long as NICE-like cost-effectiveness analyses stay on the other side of the ocean, our US biotech ecosystem will be fine. But in recent years, toxic math has begun to make its way to US soil. Peter Kolchinsky sat down with Jayson Dallas to get his take on NICE’s tactics, their increasingly global reach, and how biopharma can fight back.

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Culture, Biotech Thomas Culman Culture, Biotech Thomas Culman

COVID-19: When RA Capital’s “secret” maps go public

At RA Capital, we love our TechAtlas team and the super detailed Landscape Maps they create to help us understand what can otherwise be an overwhelming amount of information. These maps explain the comparative strengths and weaknesses of as many as hundreds of competitive and complementary technologies, drugs, devices, and diagnostics in various stages of development for a particular disease or condition. Think of them like medical treasure maps that lead to the most promising technologies and companies in any given disease area. You can probably understand why we can’t afford to do all that work and just publish the maps freely for the whole world to study.

Then COVID came along.

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