News of the Day

As current agreements have shown, trying to fix today's problems often creates new, even worse ones. Industry groups should approach the next agreement negotiations with 2031 and 2032 in mind, not the problems of 2026 and 2027.

Millions of Australians have shown they will pay full price for prescription medicines they want. They have shown less appetite for paying for vaccines they are told they need. As pressure on public funding builds, that may not hold.

Australian biotech Recce Pharmaceuticals has signed a deal with Arrotex Pharmaceuticals to sell its experimental topical gel for diabetic foot infections in Australia and New Zealand.

BioNTech has opened its clinical-scale mRNA manufacturing and research facility at La Trobe University's Bundoora campus, nearly three years after announcing the plan.

Britain has made an expensive, public bid to win back pharmaceutical investment, and it has not yet paid off. That is the finding of Open for Business, a new report from consultancy Evohealth, which describes the UK's effort as "a commitment, not yet a conversion".

CSL has named Deborah Waterhouse, a British pharmaceutical executive who helped negotiate Australian medicines policy more than 15 years ago, as its next chief executive and managing director.

Telix Pharmaceuticals has reaffirmed that it will pass US$1 billion in revenue and other income this year. Its third-quarter sales were consistent with the previous quarter, and it is working through a US$1.65 billion merger.

GLP-1 medicines were a key part of the update. Sigma said the business was still growing even though the first sales boost from these medicines is now in the base. "Growth is encouraging as we have now cycled the initial structural uplift from the introduction of GLP-1 sales," Managing Director and Chief Executive Vikesh Ramsunder said.

If anything, it is remarkable that patient groups advocate so strongly for access to medicines when the companies that make them provide so little of their funding. Advocacy that persists without the money cannot be explained by the money. It is explained by what patients need.

It reflects a maturing market. Growth no longer depends only on new patients. It also draws on a large and growing pool of former users, many of whom stopped because of cost or a dislike of injections, and who may return when the product, price, or format changes.

Patient groups in Australia and New Zealand are the most active in the Asia-Pacific region in putting patient cases to medicines regulators and funders.

A new paper published in the MJA warns that pharmaceutical companies' money threatens the independence of patient groups. Its own numbers tell a different story, and the biggest funder of consumer health advocacy goes unexamined.