WASHINGTON — The St. Louis drug company lambasted for increasing the price of a pregnancy drug from $20 to $1,500 a dose announced Friday that it’s cutting the price by more than half.
The sharp reduction to $690 per dose came two days after the Food and Drug Administration publicly invited competition.
The drug, a synthetic form of progesterone commonly called 17P and marketed under the trade name Makena, is recommended for women at high risk of delivering prematurely. The drug is administered via injection weekly for about 20 weeks.
Friday’s announcement by K-V Pharmaceutical Co. of a 55 percent price reduction puts the list cost of a full course of treatment at $13,800. That’s down from $30,000 under K-V’s old price but still a sharp jump from the $400 a woman could expect to spend if she had the drug made at a compounding pharmacy.
Until this year, an FDA-approved version of 17P was not available. So the only alternative for women was to take a prescription for the drug to a compounding pharmacy that produced individual batches of it for $10 to $20 a dose.
In February, the FDA granted K-V Pharmaceutical Co. exclusive rights to make Makena for seven years. K-V subsequently priced it at $1,500 a dose and sent letters warning compounding pharmacies of an FDA crackdown if they did not stop making their versions.
The FDA reacted Wednesday, saying it wasn’t planning on blocking compounding pharmacies from making the drug, essentially encouraging patients to go that route.
K-V defended its pricing as justified by development costs. But the FDA noted K-V relied on a study by the National Institutes of Health to demonstrate the drug’s effectiveness.
