After this summer's major drug pricing reform that left pharma lobbying groups high and dry, one major player has turned its back on prominent trade groups in Washington.
AbbVie is leaving both the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) and the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), plus the Business Roundtable, Politico first reported.
“We regularly evaluate our memberships with industry trade associations and our most recent assessment led us to decide not to renew our membership with select trade associations,” an AbbVie spokesperson told Fierce Pharma over email.
The exact reasons behind the big pharma’s departures aren't clear at this time.
“We can confirm that AbbVie has decided not to renew their membership with PhRMA in 2023,” PhRMA spokesperson Brian Newell told Fierce Pharma over email. “This does not change our focus on fighting for the solutions patients and our health care system need.”
AbbVie’s departure comes after Congress and the Biden administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the drug-pricing law that will allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. This past summer, PhRMA President and CEO Stephen Ubl called the Senate’s decision to pass the bill a “tragic loss for patients” based on a “litany of false promises.”
AbbVie's CEO Richard Gonzalez was a vocal critic of the legislation as well. He argued that instead of Medicare negotiations, the law introduces "price controls."
Now as the year wraps up and the effects from the bill start to come into play, the leading lobbying groups will be continuing without AbbVie.
Since the summer’s industry shakeup with the bill, PhRMA has remained mostly quiet, a far cry from when it was gearing up to fight the act. As the bill made its way through branches of government, the lobbying group routinely pushed back at the changes.
“While it’s premature to speculate before the bill has passed, we will explore every opportunity—including legislative, regulatory and legal—to make sure patients have access to the medicines they need and our industry can continue to develop lifesaving cures and treatments,” PhRMA spokesperson Sarah Sutton told Fierce Pharma at the time.
Recently, AbbVie’s been busy elsewhere, inking a pay-for-delay settlement and trying to put away years of opioid litigation.