Novartis freezes US drug prices

Novartis have followed in Pfizer’s footsteps and have revealed they won’t be increasing the price of any of their drugs in the US for the rest of the year.
Vas Narasimhan, new CEO of Novartis commented on the freeze, “our goal is to be reasonable with the price of our medicines, but be in line with the medical market. Where we can, we aim to always price our medicines with a value based approach.”
The decision to freeze their pricing until the end of the year was due to a good set of second quarter results. Thanks to recent launched of Cosentyx for psoriasis and heart failure therapy Entresto sales were up by 7%. By selling the consumer health business to GSK, the cash from the $13bn sale was pushed back into the business and led to the acquisition of AveXis and Advanced Accelerator Applications. CEO Vas thinks “Significant progress into turning Novartis into a focused medicines company has been made this quarter.”