Dr Jay Edelberg: Mavacamten for HCM May Help to Reduce Health Care Resource Utilization

Patients with obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) use significant health care resources, and mavacamten can help to reduce their symptoms and improve their function. In turn, this reduces stress on health care resources by reducing utilization, noted Jay Edelberg, MD, PhD, head of Heart Failure and Cardiomyopathy Development at Bristol Myers Squibb.

Transcript

What types of potential savings are available for payers if patients with obstructive HCM have mavacamten available instead of the current standard of care?

So what we're seeing here is that patients with symptoms and obstructive HCM have got significant health care utilization. They're going to hospitals, they’re using a lot of health resources there, even despite the current therapies. This shows that there is not just the medical benefit, but the pharmacoeconomics there. There's a reason that patients need more than they're getting now: because they're using a lot of health resources there.

With the ability to treat with mavacamten, where we could reduce the symptoms and improve the function, we now have the opportunity to actually be able to relieve that stress on the system by reducing the need for health utilization, because we've seen that the majority of our patients are able to get symptomatic improvements—both patient-reported as well as New York Heart in the functional improvement. This is important for our patients with their symptoms, their families, and the health care system overall by being able to relieve the health care utilization.

How important is it to help patients with obstructive HCM avoid surgery during the COVID-19 pandemic?

We think that it's important for patients to have medical options so that patients can avoid surgery regardless of whether there's a pandemic. I don't think anybody wants to need to go for a procedure when they can avoid it. We know that our patients with cardiomyopathies and HCM have attempted to—like we've all tried to do—avoid high-contact situations, which include hospitals. We've seen great enthusiasm for coming into the mavacamten trials, and we’re really excited about the opportunity for being able to use mavacamten to prevent the need for surgical interventions.

The long-term extensions that we've seen, and the sustained benefits in all of our patients, have been incredibly reassuring to us. We are so pleased with the symptom and the functional improvement that we saw on EXPLORER-HCM, and to see that happening as we continue to treat these patients in the long term has been incredibly pleasing. On top of that, the KCCQ [Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire] data, showing how well our patients are feeling, with so many of our patients becoming asymptomatic, is incredibly satisfying.

This is the reason why we went into medicine so much in the first place: We're making people feel better. And we're really excited about what mavacamten is doing for our patients with symptomatic obstructive HCM.