Lilly, Pfizer take meds straight to consumers in renewed DTC push
Lilly, Pfizer take meds straight to consumers in renewed DTC push
Big Pharma is finally beginning to offer what patient advocates have been asking for: a direct-to-consumer option to buy medicines straight from the manufacturer.
This past week, Eli Lilly announced the addition of starter Zepbound vials to its DTC platform, called LillyDirect, expanding options for patients to self-pay for the popular weight loss drug. A day later, Pfizer announced the digital portal PfizerForAll, which provides access to the New York pharma giant’s vaccines, plus migraine and respiratory drugs.
The two programs connect patients to telehealth care and a third-party service for the delivery of medicine.
“It does just make the full digital telehealth pharmacy experience online really seamless,” Dedham Group Principal Manny Jurado told BioSpace. “It’s like you’re able to integrate everything into almost more or less a one-stop shop.”
Jurado says these DTC approaches are a long time coming. Advocates have been calling for a new way for patients to access medicines that could help bring down costs by cutting out the so-called middle-men that pharma industry groups say push up prices. But DTC adoption has been slow. These latest announcements are a welcome advancement, Jurado said.
“I’m sure pharma already had a lot of plans about this multiple years ago, but it’s now finally that we’re able to see it come to fruition,” he said, acknowledging the complexity of developing these programs in terms of compliance and regulatory hurdles.
While the process cuts out the trip to the pharmacy, patients are not exactly receiving the medicine from Lilly or Pfizer’s personal storage rooms. Jurado said the pharmas have contracted third-party providers for the actual distribution.
He noted that the DTC idea is not new. Amgen and AbbVie have existing platforms and the pharma industry has played around with the idea previously with minimal success. Now that Lilly and Pfizer are diving in, he suspects more—including Lilly’s chief rival Novo Nordisk—will follow suit.
