An invasive species has been introduced into the U.S. health innovation ecosystem, with a growing danger of permanent damage to the development of specialty drugs. The relentless assault on the price of Sovaldi is becoming a threat to the 30-year political balance that has energized the biomedical revolution.
Sovaldi is the kind of medicine that the drug scolds claim to want—a true scientific advance with a near-perfect cure rate for Hepatitis C, the liver-destroying virus that infects one of every 100 Americans and some 150 million world-wide. The old critique was that pharmaceutical discovery had stalled and the industry produced only me-too drugs. Now they attack Sovaldi because its price is $84,000 a patient.