Biogen cuts Alzheimer’s drug price

Weak sales and mounting criticism for Aduhelm lead to price drop, followed by calls to pull drug off the market

Biogen slashed the price of its controversial new Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm on Monday as the drug faces weak sales and mounting criticism.

The price was reduced to $28,200 a year from $56,000 on the same day that a group of Alzheimer’s experts and health advocates called on the Food and Drug Administration to pull the drug off the market and said they were supporting an effort to file a formal petition with the agency to withdraw it.

“The FDA’s decision to approve Aduhelm is indefensible in both scientific and clinical terms,” said a statement signed by 18 scientists, most of them doctors.

“This drug should be withdrawn from the market immediately.”

The agency approved Aduhelm in June, even though a council of senior FDA officials, an advisory committee of outside experts and many Alzheimer’s specialists said the scientific evidence showed the drug did not provide a clear benefit to patients and that it carried risks of dangerous side effects.

Major health systems, including Cleveland Clinic, Mount Sinai Health System, Mass General Brigham and the Department of Veterans Affairs have declined to offer Aduhelm, citing questions about its benefits and risks.

In October, Biogen reported that Aduhelm had brought in just $1.9 million in revenue through September, a strikingly small amount given that about 1.5 million Americans have the mild Alzheimer’s-related dementia that makes them eligible for the drug.

In a statement about the price-cutting on Monday, Michel Vounatsos, Biogen’s chief executive officer, said the company had “listened to the feedback of our stakeholders” and believed “too many patients are not being offered the choice of Aduhelm due to financial considerations.”

But Brian Skorney, an analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co., said after the price announcement: “For the broad majority of people who are critical of Aduhelm, $56,000 and $28,000 are both exceptionally high prices for a drug that a lot of people perceive doesn’t work at all.”

The statement from Alzheimer’s experts and health advocates calling on the FDA to withdraw Aduhelm grew out of a three-hour video meeting among the scientists last week.

“We’re not just saying the approval was probably the worst decision the FDA ever made,” Dr. Peter Whitehouse, a neurologist and Alzheimer’s expert at Case Western Reserve University who led the Dec. 15 meeting, told attendees during the session.

“It’s so bad that we should advocate for withdrawal.”

The doctors and scientists who signed the statement also agreed to provide their expertise to support the filing of a citizen petition, a formal process to seek reversal of the FDA’s decision.

The petition will be filed by the Right Care Alliance, a coalition of clinicians, patients and community members, which is also circulating a pledge for physicians who promise not to prescribe Aduhelm and for patients and family members who say they will not request it.

Dr. Vikas Saini, chairman of the Right Care Alliance and president of the Lown Institute, a health care think tank, said that while the citizen petition process can take months or years, it can prompt FDA action.

Saini, who helped organize last week’s meeting, said that out of 45 citizen petitions filed since 1971 by the group Public Citizen, in 27 cases the FDA withdrew drugs from the market and in seven other cases the agency sharply restricted a drug’s use.