Orphan Drug Study’s Authors Say Findings May Warrant Lifting 340B Exemption
More than 70 percent of U.S. spending on top-selling “partial orphan drugs”—drugs for rare diseases that also are approved to treat common diseases—is for non-orphan indications, a study in latest edition of Health Affairs concludes. Policymakers who “wish to decrease the rewards for repurposing a common disease drug to treat rare disease” might consider limiting the 340B discount exemption “to instances in which the drug is used for the rare disease for which it has orphan drug designation,” the researchers said.