Our Approach to Pricing
Genentech has a long-standing pricing philosophy that is designed to strike a balance between ensuring patients have rapid, broad and sustainable access to our medicines, while at the same time preserving our ability to invest in future scientific innovations that drive the important medical breakthroughs that patients depend on.
This is why we take a long-term, thoughtful approach to pricing that involves several considerations, beyond the efficacy and safety profile of our medicines. In addition to the clinical benefit, which helps us begin to understand a medicine’s potential value for patients, providers, payers and the healthcare system, we seek to understand and evaluate how our medicine might be different from medicines currently being used, or if it will be the first treatment option available to patients.
We gather input from a range of stakeholders such as people living with a particular disease and their care partners, health care professionals, patient advocacy groups and professional societies as well as legislative and administration officials, to appropriately assess the medicine’s value and help ensure we price it right.
We are committed to ensuring price doesn’t prevent our medicines from getting to the people who need them.
Over the last decade, we’ve launched 20 groundbreaking medicines in areas of great need for innovation including multiple sclerosis, hemophilia, spinal muscular atrophy and different types of cancer, and we’ve priced these medicines at or below (and in some cases significantly below) other available medicines approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat the same disease.
As an industry leader, we are mindful of our responsibility to help drive meaningful change to lower patient out-of-pocket costs and save government programs money, while at the same time maintaining scientific innovation. We believe innovative payment models, combined with robust market competition mechanisms, are the most appropriate, effective and sustainable ways to reduce costs — and we have long advocated for such reforms.