A Promising Fish-Oil Heart Capsule Also Looks Cheap
It’s the rarest of drug-industry beasts: an effective medicine that might actually be underpriced.
There’s nothing fishy about Amarin’s fish-oil heart drug.
Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/bLOOmberg
Amarin Corp., the maker of a promising heart-disease capsule derived from purified fish oil, has been one of the biggest biopharma surprises of the past decade. Last year, the company’s American depositary receipts more than tripled after a clinical trial found that the pill, Vascepa, significantly cuts the risk of heart attack and stroke.
Vascepa is already available for a subset of patients, and Amarin is waiting on approval from the Food and Drug Administration to market the drug – which costs about $300 per month before discounts – to a much larger population. In the meantime, a draft report released Wednesday by the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), an independent group that assesses the value of medicines, revealed another way in which Vascepa is unique: it just might be underpriced relative to its potential benefit as an effective treatment for staving off America’s leading cause of death.