Amgen Advocates for Distinguishable Non-Proprietary Names in Substantial Comments to GPhA and Novartis Biosimilar Naming Citizen Petitions

By Kurt R. Karst –      

There’s a hot debate brewing over whether or not a biosimilar biological product licensed under Section 351(k) of the Public Health Service Act (“PHS Act”), as added by the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act of 2009 (“BPCIA”), should share the same non-proprietary name – or International Nonproprietary Name (“INN”) – as its brand-name reference product counterpart.  Last Friday, Amgen Inc. (“Amgen”) further turned up the heat when the company announced the submission of extensive comments (89 pages in length) to two citizen petitions submitted to FDA earlier this year requesting that the Agency require that a biosimilar be identified by the same INN as the reference product it relies on for approval. 

The first petition (Docket No. FDA-2013-P-1153) was submitted by the Generic Pharmaceutical Association (“GPhA”) in September and requests that FDA “implement its INN naming policy equally to all biologics” such that all biosimilars “share the same INN name as the” reference product (see our previous post here), The second petition (Docket No. FDA-2013-P-1398) was submitted in October by the Novartis Group of companies (“Novartis”) and requests that FDA “require that a biosimilar[] be identified by the same [INN] . . . as the reference product” (see our previous post here).

According to Amgen:

Contrary to the position of GPhA and Novartis . . . , we believe that a policy of identical non-proprietary names would pose significant public health risks, and is inconsistent with applicable legal requirements.  Petitioners fail to take into account fundamental scientific principles of biological products as well as their distinctive posology and methods of administration in clinical practice.  We believe that, both as a matter of public health and as a matter of law, biological products licensed under the BPCIA should have distinguishable non-proprietary names—that is, non-proprietary names comprised of common roots and distinguishable prefixes or suffixes, as deemed appropriate by FDA, to achieve the goals of patient safety through effective post-market surveillance, and widespread physician and patient acceptance and appropriate use of this important new class of medicines.

Amgen lays out its case for distinguishable non-proprietary names – and opposition to the GPhA and Novartis petitions – in seven parts, arguing along the way that:

(1)  “Biosimilars licensed under the BPCIA are appropriately neither required nor expected to be structurally identical either to their reference counterparts or to each other. Indeed, the product quality attributes for biosimilars may fall outside even the range of variability that is acceptable for the reference product, and differences in both structure and function will become increasingly prevalent as the complexity of the reference products increases.  Because biosimilars cannot be—and are not—brought to market through the same abbreviated pathway as generic drugs, the legal requirements applicable to generic drugs (including the requirement that generics bear the same labeling and established names as their reference counterparts) do not apply to biosimilars.  This difference in regulatory treatment is both appropriate and critically important to development of biosimilar medicines using state of the art technology.”

(2) “Distinct safety and immunogenicity profiles are found among structurally related biological products.  Similar biological products cannot be fully characterized in premarket clinical trials, but instead must be subject to effective post-market surveillance that distinguishes accurately among related products. . . .  [I]t is especially important that pharmacovigilance measures account for the possibility of differences in the safety profiles of related biological products.  These differences could be intrinsic to products as a result of their distinct methods of manufacture, or they could be emergent as a result of post-approval manufacturing changes.”

(3) “Because FDA’s spontaneous reporting/post-market surveillance system does not encompass the separate tracking of [products] sharing the same non-proprietary name to be separately tracked, biosimilars with the same non-proprietary names but potentially different immunogenic profiles will be difficult to distinguish, hampering immunogenicity tracking and optimal pharmacovigilance.”

(4) GPhA and Novartis include in their petitions “numerous unsupported and erroneous objections to the use of distinguishable names for biological products.”

(5) A biosimilars naming policy that would mirror the naming rules for generic drugs “would create a significant risk of confusion regarding a biosimilar product’s bioequivalence or identity to its reference product.  Moreover, given FDA’s obligations under the Administrative Procedure Act to treat like cases alike and to explain any departures from precedent, FDA would need to reconcile any naming policy with its past statements recognizing the potential safety risks of using identical established names for similar biological products, as well as instances in which FDA has required, for safety reasons, the use of distinguishable names for similar products.”

(6) “[T]the need for better pharmacovigilance measures for all drug products does not obviate the need for distinguishable names to facilitate post-market risk management in the context of biosimilars.”

(7) Alternative pharmacovigilance mechanisms, such as those suggested by GPhA in its citizen petition, “are not sufficient to address the need for robust post-market surveillance of biological products.”  Efforts to create a federal tracing system “is not capable of ensuring the robust pharmacovigilance systems necessary for biological products if biosimilars are assigned identical non-proprietary names to their respective reference products.”

There has been growing speculation that 2014 will see the first 351(k) application submitted to and accepted by FDA for a biosimilar biological product.  If that that’s true, and if we see a biosimilar approved in in the near future, then FDA’s consideration of the GPhA and Novartis petitions – and the opposition to them – will likely finally come to a head.  Although FDA previously indicated in a 2006 policy paper sent to the World Health Organization that “INNs should not be used to differentiate products with the same active ingredient(s) when credible scientific data demonstrate that no pharmacologically relevant differences exist,” the Agency’s current position is unclear.