Who is afraid of biosimilars? Openness to biosimilars in an Australian cohort of patients with rheumatoid arthritis

Abstract

Biosimilars are increasingly adopted to improve affordability of biologics. An effective introduction of biosimilars requires an understanding of patient acceptance of these agents. We performed a cross‐sectional study of 132 patients with rheumatoid arthritis prior to the introduction of biosimilar switching or prescribing in this cohort. Despite being unfamiliar with biosimilars, most patients are willing to accept biosimilar medicines if recommended by their rheumatologist. Patient concerns about biosimilar uptake mainly focus on concerns about its efficacy. There is a significant correlation between patient attitudes towards biosimilar and generic medicines.

Policies to Encourage the Use of Biosimilars in European Countries and Their Potential Impact on Pharmaceutical Expenditure

“…The latter is fundamentally important to enable informed choice and decision-making for patients and providers. As observed for generics over the last decade, the acceptance of biosimilar medicines by patients and health care providers, in particular prescribing doctors, plays a major role for their uptake: concerns raised so far mainly relate to safety and efficacy, while the savings potential and continuous supply are seen as advantages of biosimilars (Baji et al, 2016;Leonard et al, 2019;Kovitwanichkanont et al, 2020;Sarnola et al, 2020). These concerns need to be addressed, and trust has to be built in the quality of biosimilars, as otherwise demand-side measures would not be able to exploit their potential to foster uptake.…”

“…The illustrative calculations for Germany in "Impact of Selected Measures on Pharmaceutical Expenditure Under Different Scenarios" Section of the manuscript were conducted for some but not all the policy options presented in "Overview of Pricing and Procurement Mechanisms and Demand-Side Measures to Endorse the Use of Biosimilars in European Countries" Section. Furthermore, the descriptive comparison of policies in European countries itself is not exhaustive; rather, those policy measures that have been recognized in the literature (Kovitwanichkanont et al, 2020) as major for generic medicines were investigated here for biosimilars. Further pricing, procurement, and reimbursement policies (e.g.…”

Is There Any Research Evidence Beyond Surveys and Opinion Polls on Automatic Substitution of Biological Medicines? A Systematic Review

“…The majority (56%, 15/27) of the included studies were conducted in Europe [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43], followed by North America (n = 4) [44][45][46][47], Australia (n = 2) [48,49], Pakistan (n = 1) [50], Russia (n = 1) [51], Tunisia (n = 1) [52], Latin America (n = 1) [53], mixed in France and Canada (n = 1) [54], and mixed in Asian countries (n = 1) [55]. The study…”

“…participants were physicians (n = 12) [30,36,37,39,44,45,47,48,[51][52][53]55], pharmacists (n = 5) [31,38,43,50,54], patients (n = 4) [32,34,40,49], payers (n = 1) [46], or various stakeholders (n = 5) [29,33,35,41,42]. All semi-structured interviews had participants of various stakeholders and were from Europe [29,33,35,42].…”

“…In 44% of the studies (12/27), the data collection had begun in 2015 or earlier [29, 30, 36-41, 45-47, 53]. Almost one third of the studies (8/27) were conducted in countries that allowed limited pharmacist-led automatic substitution of biologics [32,38,39,48,49] or substitution was not specifically prohibited at the time of data collection [31,33,43]. Most of the studies (81%, 22/27) had a primary focus other than automatic substitution of biologics.…”