Nonprofit Will Sell $30 Insulin Direct to Patients Starting in 2024

CivicaRx, the nonprofit drug manufacturer owned by a consortium of health systems and health plans, aims to release a line of three insulins — glargine (Lantus), lispro (Humalog) and aspart (Novolog) — as soon as 2024. Those insulins will be available in vials or prefilled pens and will be priced at “no more than $30 per vial and no more than $55 for a box of five pen cartridges” for all consumers, regardless of whether they have insurance; the products will soon be submitted for review for interchangeable biosimilar approval by the FDA.

The CivicaRx initiative could do something that existing proposals to cap the price of insulin would not: It may actually lower the list price of insulin products. Ge Bai, Ph.D., tells AIS Health, a division of MMIT, that she expects the insulins will set the standard price in their category when they become available. (Bai, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s schools of business and public health, has authored several publications with Dan Liljenquist, an executive at the Intermountain Healthcare hospital system and the chair of CivicaRx’s board.)