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In other news:
About health insurance/insurers
Ohio payer beats UnitedHealthcare in racketeering lawsuit, awarded $50M: An Ohio jury awarded Medical Mutual of Ohio over $50 million in damages on March 12 after the payer prevailed in its lawsuit against FrontPath Health Coalition and HealthScope Benefits, a subsidiary of UnitedHealthcare.
FrontPath offers employee benefits solutions, and HealthScope is a third-party administrator.
The two companies were accused of conspiring to form an enterprise that consisted of their executives and engaging in fraudulent practices that manipulated the bidding process for a health benefits contract with the city of Toledo in 2015 and 2018. Medical Mutual claimed that the two companies gained unauthorized access to its confidential financial data, which they then used to artificially lower bids, according to a March 14 news release from the company.
The defendants were found to have committed federal wire fraud, telecommunications fraud, tampered with records, and obstructed justice by submitting false bid information. The jury found that the conspiracy resulted in significant damages to Medical Mutual and ultimately caused taxpayers to pay higher healthcare costs than necessary.
About pharma
Optum Rx’s new payment model favors brand names over generics: Effective March 20, Optum Rx will increase reimbursements to pharmacies for brand-name drugs and cut them for generics.
Optum Rx said the new pharmacy payment models are in response to price increases set by brand name drug manufacturers.
“With this change, Optum Rx is addressing a legacy, industrywide model that was originally designed to help promote the use of affordable generics,” the company said in a news release. “Effective generic adoption is now quite strong, and increasingly, more high-cost branded drugs are entering the market, raising costs for pharmacies.”
Purdue Pharma files new $7.4B bankruptcy reorganization plan to settle opioid claims: The company hopes to emerge from the Chapter 11 bankruptcy process it entered in 2019 with a new reorganization plan, filed Wednesday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. The plan lays out more than $7.4 billion in payments to compensate opioid victims and “abate the opioid crisis,” Purdue said in a press release.
Sanofi pays $600M upfront for Dren Bio's bispecific myeloid cell engager: Sanofi agreed to acquire a targeted bispecific myeloid cell engager from Dren Bio for $600 million upfront, boosting the French drugmaker's efforts in resetting the immune system and its goal of becoming the leader in immunology.
The deal for the CD20-directed candidate DR-0201 also includes potential development and launch milestone payments of $1.3 billion.
The companies noted that DR-0201 targets and engages specific tissue-resident and trafficking myeloid cells to induce deep B-cell depletion via targeted phagocytosis. The bispecific has shown robust B-cell depletion in preclinical testing and two ongoing Phase I trials.