Bluebird puts €1.57m price on gene therapy Zynteglo

Bluebird Bio’s gene therapy treatment for beta thalassemia Zynteglo is to be priced at €1.57m in Europe, where the first patients are expected to be treated later this year.

This total treatment cost will be split up into five instalments of €315,000 over five years, with payments 2-5  only made if patients continue to achieve independence from transfusion.

This plan has much in common with the outcomes-based instalment plan put forward by Novartis for its SMA gene therapy Zolgensma, which gained approval last month in the US.

Zolgensma is priced even higher, at $2.12m, but both companies are winning over payers with their similar instalment payment plans, and argue that these costs work out lower than equivalent rare disease treatments which have to be taken lifelong.

The US biotech revealed the price of Zynteglo (autologous CD34+ cells encoding βA-T87Q-globin gene) to Pharma Market Europe in an exclusive briefing with its head of Europe, Andrew Obenshain, ahead of the firm's analyst call from the EHA congress in Amsterdam.

The one-time gene therapy was approved in Europe earlier this month for patients 12 years and older with transfusion-dependent β-thalassaemia (TDT), and has been shown in a series of small studies to free a majority of patients from the need to have these regular blood transfusions.

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