Thanks Dave for sharing. It has been a labor of love and persistence and you have been at the center of it. Great to see a comprehensive plan proposed at the highest level and not just in specialists circles.
CBO @ Beacon Biosignals | Former BCG Partner, BrightInsight CCO | PhD Computational Neuroscience 1y Edited
I have a family member with hepatitis C. While I typically post about today I’m celebrating a turning point for healthcare more broadly. After more than a decade of work, we finally have a U.S.-wide plan to eliminate HCV. When Gilead acquired and launched the first cure for HCV in 2013, my dear friend and colleague Jean-Manuel Izaret and I solved for the ensuing treatment access problem. What pricing model could (a) provide universal patient access to the cure, while (b) maintaining affordability to payers and (c) incentivizing pharma innovation with sufficient margin? Our answer was to roughly mimic software licensing, where–similar to pharma–large upfront R&D costs lead to products with ongoing user benefits monetized by subscription payments. We finally shared it publicly several years ago: https://lnkd.in/gBxBTJC7 … and for the wonks who prefer Markov models in epidemiology, the peer-reviewed work: https://lnkd.in/gvjWS8sK But we also had the opportunity to work on it behind the scenes well in advance, and with brilliant collaborators and advisors also motivated to innovate on big problems whose solutions can improve the world. Too many to thank, but especially: Homie Razavi, Samantha Coleman, Martin Reeves, Mark Lubkeman, Stefan Larsson, James Kahn, Elliot Marseille, Lou Garrison, Stefano Bertozzi, Dan Grossman, Barry Rosenberg, the Center for Disease Analysis, LLC, and the generous fellowship at BCG Henderson Institute during my time at Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The work isn’t done. Getting the economics right is part of the answer, but so are large-scale testing efforts, to improve linkage to care, and reinfection management. Most important, we have to get the plan to action, as in Australia and Louisiana already. But I’m happy to celebrate a big step forward today. Former NIH Director Francis S. Collins on the New White House Plan to Eliminate Hepatitis C