Will the industry sell COVID-19 meds at the min production costs?
April 15, 2020 By expresspharma
https://www.en-cphi.cn/news/show-60516.html

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A recent study by Andrew Hill et al in the Journal of Virus Eradication projects the minimum costs to manufacture new treatments for COVID-19. Given that most of these are not new medicines but ‘repurposed’ existing medicines, the authors estimated the minimum costs of production from the costs of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) using established methodology, which had good predictive accuracy for medicines for hepatitis C and HIV amongst others. Data were extracted from global export shipment records or analysis of the route of chemical synthesis. The estimated costs were compared with list prices from a range of countries where pricing data were available.

Hill et al estimated that the minimum costs of production were $0.93/day for remdesivir, $1.45/day for favipiravir, $0.08/day for hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), $0.02/day for chloroquine, $0.10/day for azithromycin, $0.28/day for lopinavir/ritonavir, $0.39/day for sofosbuvir/daclatasvir and $1.09/day for pirfenidone. Costs of production ranged between $0.30 and $31 per treatment course (10–28 days). The authors point out that the current prices of these drugs were far higher than the costs of production, particularly in the US.