Collaboration to improve accessibility and sustainability of new cell and gene therapiesThursday, May 27, 2021
Global biotherapeutic leader CSL Behring has joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Biomedical Innovation’s New Drug Development Paradigms (NEWDIGS)initiative. The company will collaborate on NEWDIGS’s FoCUS Project, which addresses the need for innovative financing and reimbursement models for durable and potentially curable therapies that ensure patient access and sustainability for all stakeholders.
CSL Behring joins a consortium of other leading thinkers representing manufacturer, insurance, public policy, caregiver, and patient perspectives. In NEWDIGS’s unique safe haven environment, consortium members collaborate for cross-sector problem solving to overcome financing and reimbursement challenges posed by new cell and gene therapies for genetic disorders and cancer. Such therapies, which are delivered in a single dose or a short treatment regimen, yield lasting health benefits but large single payments will challenge the current reimbursement system.
FoCUS produces research and recommendations that educate stakeholders about the financing challenges, and that enable them to find practical means of cooperation. Its work, called Precision Financing Strategies, is freely available online and distributed through peer-reviewed articles, media articles, meetings, and workshops.
“Joining the NEWDIGS FoCUS Project will give CSL Behring the opportunity to help make innovative therapies more accessible to patients, and more sustainable system-wide,” said Robert Rouse, Head of US Market Access for CSL Behring. “This is consistent with our 100-year legacy of saving lives with the latest science, with our focus on serious and rare diseases, and with our commitment to our patients.”
Tsega Meshesa, FoCUS Project program manager said, “We welcome CSL Behring into the consortium at an important time, as we refine the foundation we’ve built over the last four years and are working hard to propagate our findings and recommendations, to accelerate adoption of cell and gene therapies by the healthcare system.”
“CSL Behring strengthens our consortium’s perspectives on how to achieve patient impact with cutting-edge therapies,” said Gigi Hirsch, MD, executive director of NEWDIGS. “The science is necessary but not sufficient—in FoCUS, they can help us address challenges in the in the complex healthcare system that undermine the value that medical discoveries can deliver.”
About CSL Behring
CSL Behring is a global biotherapeutics leader driven by its promise to save lives. Focused on serving patients’ needs by using the latest technologies, the company develops and delivers innovative therapies that are used to treat coagulation disorders, primary immune deficiencies, hereditary angioedema, respiratory disease, and neurological disorders. The company’s products are also used in cardiac surgery, burn treatment and to prevent hemolytic disease of the newborn. CSL Behring operates one of the world’s largest plasma collection networks, CSL Plasma. The parent company, CSL Limited (ASX:CSL;USOTC:CSLLY), headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, employs more than 27,000 people worldwide, and delivers its life-saving therapies to people in more than 100 countries. For inspiring stories about the promise of biotechnology, visit Vita at CSLBehring.com/vita and follow us on Twitter.com/CSLBehring.
About the FoCUS Consortium
The MIT NEWDIGS consortium FoCUS Project (Financing and Reimbursement of Cures in the US) seeks to collaboratively address the need for new, innovative financing and reimbursement models for durable and potentially curable therapies that ensure patient access and sustainability for all stakeholders. Our mission is to deliver an understanding of financial challenges created by these therapies leading to system-wide, implementable precision financing models. This multi-stakeholder effort gathers developers, providers, regulators, patient advocacy groups, payers from all segments of the US healthcare system, and academics working in healthcare policy, financing, and reimbursement in this endeavor. https://newdigs.mit.edu/programs-projects/focus
About NEWDIGS
The NEW Drug Development ParadIGmS (NEWDIGS) Initiative at MIT is an international “think and do tank” dedicated to delivering more value faster to patients, in ways that work for all stakeholders. NEWDIGS designs, evaluates and initiates advancements that are too complex and cross-cutting to be addressed by a single organization or market sector. Its members include global leaders from patient advocacy, payer organizations, biopharmaceutical companies, regulatory agencies, clinical care, academic research and investment firms. For more information, visit http://newdigs.mit.edu.