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Marsh partners on pharma warranty program

Posted On: May. 8, 2023 2:30 PM CST

Marsh

Marsh LLC said Monday it has partnered with New Brunswick, New Jersey-based Octaviant Financial Inc. to offer a warranty program to pharmaceutical manufacturers that develop gene, cell and specialty therapies.

The warranties reimburse health care payers, including Medicaid and Medicare, should an advanced therapy treatment fail to deliver the expected medical outcomes on a given patient, Marsh said.

Each warranty program, including the trigger, will be tailored to an individual pharmaceutical company and type of gene therapy.

Pharmaceutical manufacturers will self-fund their individual warranty program and may use various strategies to transfer the risk, including captives and reinsurance.

Octaviant Financial will help select the benefit trigger, which may rely on clinical trial data and other outcome measures to ensure a pharmaceutical company is offering the most competitive warranty possible to payers.

The program is available to Marsh life sciences clients and provides them access to various strategic insights and proprietary tools.

“To fully realize the benefit of these advanced therapies, health care payers should have meaningful financial recourse in instances where these therapies do not perform as expected,” Eddie Albers, U.S. life science industry practice leader at Marsh, said in a statement.

Since 2017, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved 27 advanced therapies, with thousands more in development or clinical trial phase, that may cure rare diseases, genetic disorders and cancers in a single-dose treatment.

Each treatment cost can run as high as several million dollars, which can strain the health care system with upfront costs and bar patient access, despite the potential to lower health care costs over time.