Healthcare Economist April 15, 2022
If you were a drug manufacturer, you naturally would want to focus your research on more common, highly prevalent diseases. If there are more patients with the disease, that means more drugs that can be sold.
In recent years, however, the number of so-called “orphan drugs” has increased. In the 1970s, only 10 orphan drugs were approved. Between 1983 until 2019, there have 564 orphan drugs that had been approved by the FDA. Why the change?
The primary reason was the passage Orphan Drug Act (ODA), which created financial incentives to encourage companies to develop new drugs for rare disease. What were these incentives? I list a number of them below, many summarized from a recent ICER white paper on...
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