Sanofi Pasteur MSD gets Zostavax through first EU-wide rapid assessment
This article was originally published in Scrip
Executive Summary
Sanofi Pasteur MSD (SPMSD) is the first pharmaceutical company to go through a pilot scheme run by the European network of health technology assessment agencies (EUnetHTA), which is aimed at rapidly producing relative effectiveness assessments to be used by HTAs across Europe. The company's shingles vaccine Zostavax was declared more effective than placebo. The challenge now is to persuade a knot of resistant European countries to use EUnetHTA's report in their national reimbursement assessments, rather than duplicating the same sorts of studies at regional level. EUnetHTA must also convince companies that the benefits of the scheme outweigh the risks associated with a potentially negative pan-European outcome.
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