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Biosimilars: when value meets cost

Published on March 30, 2023   25 min

A selection of talks on Pharmaceutical Sciences

0:00
Hello, I am Fernando de Mora Professor of Pharmacology at a fairly big Spanish University called Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, a public University. I have been asked to deliver a talk on biosimilars and try to convey the message that volume meets costs in that case.
0:20
So the message that I want to deliver would be biosimilar, in fact, is a biological medicine. that shares the active substance with an original biologic. It is administered by the same route, at the same dose, and for the same indications. What I want to do is I want to try to help you understand why can we conclude this?
0:43
We will address this issue by discussing four topics. I will start with explaining what is a biologic medicine vs non-biological medicine.
0:54
Well, let's assume for the purpose of this talk that a biologic is just a medicine, obtained from a living organism. If we go to legal definitions, that is far more complicated. But we can consider that whenever a living organism is producing the medicine, it is a biologic medicine. For instance, insulin from the pancreas. That was at that time a biologic medicines. But we can also obtain biologic medicines from human sources. For instance, factor VIII. If I get the blood, extract blood from healthy volunteers, I can isolate the coagulation factor VIII and use it in hemophilic patients. Now, is there an alternative source of this human factor VIII? Indeed there is.