Dr Kirollos Hanna Talks About How His Practice Has Fared With Uptake of Oncology Biosimilars

Kirollos Hanna, PharmD, manager of Oncology Pharmacy at the University of Minnesota Medical Center, discusses the uptake of oncology biosimilars at his practice.

Transcript

What has been your experience with the use of biosimilars in oncology at the University of Minnesota?

Hanna: Biosimilars have been around now for quite some time. And I think when biosimilars first rolled out, we really had some challenges and hurdles that we we had to really jump through from. It stemmed all the way from education, patient preference, institutional preference and what we really want to do. But I think now from where we are biosimilars have been integrated, really across the board for many of our patients with cancer, even those patients that do come to our infusion centers to receive a specialty infusions that may be for nononcology indications. Really they've become part of the standard of care. Our approach has been when we're evaluating a new biosimilar that comes to market. We do our analysis to our standard P&T [pharmacy and therapeutics] committees and all of that and really try to roll it out after we've done a full analysis of really how many biosimilars are available for that specific reference product, because what we don't want to do is that every year or every couple of years we go and have to reevaluate contracts, pricing, and things like that. But yeah, biosimilars, we've kind of hammered it down in terms of education. You know, physician buy-in and really their preferences. We have protocols that allow pharmacists to switch between reference products and biosimilars if a payer mandates one way or another, but I would say it's been a pretty positive rollout.