Good morning, Madam Chair, honourable members of the committee. My name is Daniel Billen. I'm vice-president and general manager of Amgen in Canada.
I want to thank the committee for having invited me to this hearing and I am very pleased to have this opportunity to present AMGEN's viewpoint on the effectiveness of the Common Drug Review Program.
Too many of us in this room have family and friends who have suffered from cancer, kidney disease, rheumatoid arthritis, or other grievous illnesses. Many of those people are dependent on the government to provide medicine to deal with their disease.
At Amgen, our mission is to serve patients, especially those patients who suffer from serious disease.
Let me begin by telling you about how biotechnology is unique. It's a technology that uses living organisms to make new medicines instead of using traditional chemicals.
Biotechnology is a relatively new science, and advances in biotechnology provide unprecedented opportunities in medicine.
With this revolutionary approach that uses living organisms to make new medicines, biotechnology creates the potential to deal with critically unmet medical needs to treat cancer, multiple sclerosis, renal failure, and Alzheimer's, to name just a few.
The current biotechnology medicines are among the world's biggest breakthrough products—medicines such as Herceptin, Enbrel, and Neupogen. Today, 20% of all approved medicines are biotechnology medicines, and if we look 5 to 10 years ahead, that number will grow to close to 50%.
Let me now turn to Amgen and the impact on the patients we serve. Amgen is the largest biotechnology company in the world, and it prides itself on having served more than 10 million patients around the world for over 15 years. In Canada, half of our patients suffer from rheumatoid arthritis, and a quarter of our patients suffer from cancer or kidney disease.
If we look at Amgen's experience with CDR, it is the patients who have suffered the most. Over the last 15 years, Amgen has had five major medicines approved by Health Canada. Prior to CDR, all three of these medicines received wide public reimbursement across Canada. However, under CDR, zero out of the two remaining products received public reimbursement. Clearly, CDR did not improve patient access to Amgen's medicines.
Let us look at the facts from a global perspective. In an international study conducted by Rx&D in 2006, we can clearly see that Canada reimburses fewer medicines than other industrialized nations such as France, Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and even Australia.
Let us focus on first-in-class medicines, or medicines that are the first of their kind. Of the seven medicines that came to market, the countries I just talked about on average recommended that five of them be publicly reimbursed. In Canada, zero of these medicines received a positive recommendation from CDR. Ladies and gentlemen, the picture on this slide is worth a thousand words.
CDR has been a fundamental failure. It has denied access to vital medicines. It puts Canadians at an overwhelming disadvantage compared to other modern countries. This denial of access is absolutely tragic for patients. It is unacceptable for us as Canadians.
So what should we do? We propose three practical, actionable, and deliverable reforms that could be implemented immediately: first, create a separate assessment process for first-in-class medicines; second, improve public accountability with public interest hearings and by making CDR subject to access to information requests; and third, establish an independent administrative appeal process for CDR recommendations.
Our common goal is to improve the human condition by providing patients access to critically important medicines.
Ladies and gentlemen, every day across this country patients hear the following words: “I'm sorry, there's nothing more we can do.” Well, ladies and gentlemen, there is something we can do. Can we not agree here and now that our shared goal as a society must be—it must be—to put patients first, to make critically important medicines available to Canadians?
Thank you.
I will be happy to answer your questions.