Prices of 137 cancer drugs to fall by up to 70% from November 9

This follows a nudge by Supreme Court, flagging the huge gap between price to retailer and MRP of medicines billed to patients

In good news for cancer patients, prices of 137 drugs are set to be reduced by up to 70% from Nov 9, with govt capping trade margins by 30%. Drug prices regulator National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) Saturday notified the 137 non-scheduled anti-cancer drugs to address the issue of excessive trade margins, invoking Paragraph 19 of DPCO, 2013. Significantly, patented drugs are also included in the list. The trade margin rationalisation at 30% of MRP, excluding GST, corresponds to a mark-up of 42.9% on price to stockist/price to distributor (PTS/PTD), according to the minutes of the NPPA meeting accessed by TOI. Simply put, PTS/PTD is the first point of sale of the drug. This follows a nudge by Supreme Court, flagging the huge gap between price to retailer and MRP of medicines billed to patients, in certain cases of 10 times. The MRPs of certain drugs — including pertuzumab + trastuzumab, atezolizumab, teclistamab, inotuzumab ozogamicin and daratumumab — are up to Rs 5 lakh per vial/pack. All manufacturers will be required to inform NPPA of their revised prices within seven days of publication of the gazette notification. Manufacturers will be req-uired to display the price lists on their website and widely disseminate them to all retailers and hospitals, with the latter also required to display the revised prices on their websites prominently. The authority approved the calculation of the revised MRP based on PTS/PTD for March 2026 as the reference month. NPPA said patient assistance programme quantities may be excluded from the calculation of PTS/PTD and MRP for trade-margin capping only. These programmes, where drugs are supplied free of cost, are typically run by MNCs. As a substantial supply of anti-cancer drugs is directly made to hospitals and medical institutions, they shall be responsible for ensuring revised prices of such drugs from the date of implementation, NPPA said. State drug controllers will take necessary steps to ensure compliance by manufacturers, dealers including retailers, hospitals and medical institutions, it added. In a bid to tighten rules further, NPPA said uninterrupted availability of the covered formulations needed to be ensured. Any manufacturer intending to reduce monthly production levels would have to obtain permission.

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Consumers can use the Pharma Sahi Daam app and NPPA website to check revised prices of drugs, an official release said. In 2019, the MRP of 526 brands of non-scheduled anti-cancer medicines was reduced by up to 90%, NPPA said. The present exercise extends this approach to a larger set of drugs, based on the list recommended by an expert committee under Directorate General of Health Services.

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