Biotech CEO: Drug companies will suffer if they don’t police themselves

The best way for the drug industry to protect a profitable future is by leaving some money on the table in the present.

That’s according to Paul Hastings, CEO of Nkarta Therapeutics, writing in STAT to encourage his colleagues to embrace a “social contract that drug companies, mine included, have a duty to responsibly set list prices so patients can access needed medicines.” The alternative, according to Hastings, is a status quo that might bait the government into severe policies that dim the future in the name of short-term savings, making the industry’s worst actors victims of their own success.

“Not all price increases are exorbitant, nor are all patent extensions frivolous,” Hastings writes, “but the behavior of a few is laying waste to the reputation of the entire pharmaceutical industry at the worst possible time: as the genomic medicine revolution begins to deliver a new era of previously unimaginable cures.”

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