Drug prices: what criteria?

Summary Cyril Benoît was interviewed for the publication of his book "Regulating Access to Medicines. 1st lines: What do you call the social value of a drug? This is a notion that I use to describe an important political and regulatory evolution that has been observed in most Western countries over the last twenty years. Previously, the value of a drug was essentially understood from a therapeutic point of view, sanctioned by randomized double-blind clinical trials, with the establishment of a benefit-risk ratio, etc. This methodology was born in the 1960s and 1970s. This methodology was born in the 1960s and 1970s, when the pharmaceutical industry definitively left the pharmacy model. Large firms were formed, using increasingly rational processes to identify and produce drugs. In the 1980s and 1990s, another industrial transformation occurred, with the appearance of biotechnologies and the development of increasingly targeted and expensive drugs, no longer intended for a very large number of patients but for a few thousand, or even fewer, patients. The question then arose more or less explicitly as to whether it was worth devoting significant resources to small population groups, and perhaps in the future even to individuals, in a context of limited resources. Numerous agencies or bureaucratic organizations have been created to try to convert the therapeutic value of drugs into a market or social value: is the therapeutic efficacy of this molecule worth giving it a price? If so, which one? On what criteria? For which patients? etc.