Richard Pops on patient access
From Ep. 110 - Richard Pops on Three Decades in Biotech: Drug pricing, FDA and China · · BioCentury Video
“For our antipsychotics, for example, patients are required to fail on multiple generics, sometimes as many as five generics before they can get access to the medicine. And it's horrible. There's nothing defensible about it when a patient with a serious chronic disease, a decision is made by a physician intelligently to provide specific medicine to them that they're forcing, 'Well, that's a good idea, but why don't you fail four or five other drugs?' Cuz what that means is probably four or five years of the patient's life where they're cycling through ineffective medications, relapse, progression, and so on.”
On , Richard Pops, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer at ALKERMES PLC, spoke about patient access during Ep. 110 - Richard Pops on Three Decades in Biotech: Drug pricing, FDA and China on BioCentury Video.
About Richard Pops
Richard Pops, chairman and soon-to-be former CEO of Alkermes, announced he will step down as CEO in July 2026 and remain as chairman. In several podcast interviews over the past two months, Pops discussed his 35-year tenure at the company and his ongoing public policy engagement. He noted that he chairs a new trade group called the Midsize Biotech Alliance of America (MBAA), which he said was formed because midsize biotechs share common experiences of taking 20 to 30 years to reach profitability and facing repeated near-death events. Pops said that the current period is one of the most important for public policy affecting the industry. Pops commented on a range of policy issues. Regarding the most-favored nation (MFN) concept, he stated that there is no draft legislation and that while the idea of equilibrating global drug prices is understandable, MFN needs to be done correctly and is unlikely to pass in the current legislative session. He described the Inflation Reduction Act’s impact on drug development incentives, saying that by reducing exclusivity from 13 to 9 years, the policy effectively halves the revenue curve for small molecules, pushing companies toward developing biologics for rare diseases paid by commercial insurers. On Part D redesign, he said that requiring manufacturers to pay 20% of revenues to the government would have made Alkermes unprofitable, and that his company demonstrated the math to policymakers to secure a phase-in for smaller companies. Pops also criticized the current system requiring patients with serious mental illness to fail multiple generics before accessing newer medications, calling it “nothing defensible.” He advocated for building an intentional clinical trial infrastructure in the US that is optimized for speed and safety, making it more attractive to develop drugs domestically rather than abroad.