Patients First

JUST A FEW short weeks ago, a young man who is now 18 and living with primary immune deficiency disease (PIDD) graced our company with a visit to talk with our teams. While I have been blessed to meet many such patients over the course of my more than 21 years of experience in this industry, each encounter is a reminder of how critical what we do is to so many, and how far we have come despite many obstacles. As this young man and his parents described their experiences throughout the years — from the difficulty in arriving at an accurate diagnosis, to individually and collectively as a family dealing with obtaining and administering immune globulin (IG) — it was apparent that our obstacles are minor compared to those that the chronically ill are faced with each and every day.

This young man has made it part of his life’s mission to help others better understand how essential their help is to him and others like him. He frequents plasma collection centers to thank donors and to show them the end result of their actions — the impact their donations have made on his life and the lives of many others — rewarding those donors with insight that is far more valuable than the check they will receive. During his visit to our company, he demonstrated how he is now able to selfinfuse subcutaneous IG (SCIG), illustrating the impact this treatment has had on his lifestyle, and reminding us how many donors are needed for just one patient’s weekly treatments.

Keeping a patient focus and understanding how pharmaceutical advances have improved the quality of life for patients is illustrated in this issue’s article, “Better by Design: New Coagulation Products on the Horizon.” In the early 1960s, the outlook was grim for young males with hemophilia; yet just five years later, those same boys’ odds improved dramatically, and today, the availability of safe therapies and the ease of their administration have had remarkable impact on these patients’ quality of life. As this article highlights, the best may be yet to come, with astounding scientific breakthroughs showing great promise in clinical trials.

Also in this issue, we look at the intricate process of producing plasma protein therapies — from collection to fractionation to manufacturing — in our article, Plasma Therapies: IG in the Driver’s Seat. Because production of these therapies differs so significantly from traditional pharmaceutical manufacturing, and is tied to the fragile economics dependent on demand for all of the plasma derivatives, its complexity is often misunderstood, adding to reimbursement concern.

The topic of reimbursement is always front burner as issues continue to heat up with healthcare reform. Unfortunately, those with chronic and rare diseases continue to be left out of the discussion on such important topics as unaffordable copays/coinsurance, lifetime caps, step therapy and brand switching. Our new column, Reimbursement FAQs, tackles some reimbursement questions. While this issue’s column focuses on IG, future columns will answer some of the most commonly misunderstood questions about reimbursement for all types of therapies. In addition, our new Reimbursement Unraveled teleforums have been created to continue the dialogue about the complex issues that healthcare providers face in being reimbursed for these critical therapeutics.

As always, we hope you find this issue of BioSupply Trends Quarterly informative, insightful and useful to you and your colleagues.

Helping Healthcare Care,

Patrick M. Schmidt

Publisher