After growing the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) into an influential drug pricing watchdog, Steve Pearson, M.D., is stepping down.
The ICER founder will shed the president title and transition to an advisory role at the end of the year, the nonprofit said in a statement Wednesday.
Sarah Emond, who has been ICER’s chief operating officer, will take the reins. Emond has been in that role since joining the organization as its third employee in 2009, overseeing its public program operations, engagement with stakeholders and finance.
Pearson founded ICER in 2006 as a research program at Harvard Medical School. Over the past 17 years, ICER has established a substantial presence in the drug pricing ecosystem in the U.S. Drugmakers, insurers and payers often look to its health economics analyses to make price or coverage decisions.
“When I founded ICER, I envisioned a laboratory where people could work together to bring evidence to light in service of building a health care system they could be proud of. A laboratory where good science, honesty, integrity, and mutual respect could combine to break down walls and bring all participants in the health care system together to do the hard work of wrestling with uncertainty and weighing how best to align pricing with value in support of better access for patients,” Pearson said in a statement Wednesday.
The biopharma industry has had its differences with ICER. Emond herself clashed with Regeneron CEO Len Schleifer, M.D., Ph.D., on ICER’s methodology for cost-effectiveness evaluations at a healthcare conference in 2016. At that time, ICER’s identity as a cost watchdog was still controversial, and its analysis of the PCSK9 inhibitor class of cholesterol drugs—including Regeneron and Sanofi’s Praluent—led to a contentious debate.
In 2019, after hitting walls with payers, the PCSK9 drug developers basically accepted ICER’s price benchmark and lowered their medicines' prices to win favorable formulary placements. In hindsight, the PCSK9 victory could be viewed as a landmark event that established ICER’s authority along the pharmaceuticals value chain.
Almost all payers know about ICER and use its report to help guide their price negotiations and coverage decisions, Pearson said in an interview with Fierce Pharma in February, pointing to outside surveys.
The relationship between biopharma and ICER has become more amicable and collaborative in recent years. Nowadays, drugmakers sometimes approach the group for pricing discussions before launching their products, Pearson said. In fact, Sanofi and Regeneron contacted ICER before the rollout of Dupixent.
The organization’s general approach these days is to reach out to the companies before publishing a report.
“We spend a lot of time talking to them at the beginning around their understanding of the evidence,” Pearson said during the February interview. “We asked if they can point us to any evidence that’s not in the public domain, or tell us where they think the evidence is faulty. And we ask them about their own efforts and economic modeling to help inform what we’re going to do.”
ICER has also been doing cost-effective analyses more frequently, following some closely watched areas such as cell and gene therapy, fatty liver disease and Alzheimer’s disease. And the organization is paying more attention to the cell and gene therapies as these costly one-time treatments grow in number. ICER is also considering expanding its report to digital therapeutics, Pearson said in February.
Now, Emond will take over with at least one year of additional help from Pearson as an adviser throughout 2024. Before joining ICER, Emond worked for a healthcare communications firm and in corporate communications at Oscient Pharmaceuticals, which later went bankrupt.
Assessing the value of cell and gene therapies and working on innovative payment approaches remain a top priority on the incoming president’s agenda, ICER told Fierce Pharma. In addition, digital health and assessing insurance barriers to fair access are two of her other priorities.
“She is a true expert in the intricacies of the health system and how pricing drives access. She has a superb track record of integrating patients’, clinicians’, manufacturers’, and payers’ perspectives into ICER’s range of activities,” Leigh Purvis, ICER’s governance board chair, said of Emond in a statement.