The agency's long and costly approach to regulating generic drugs is reducing competition in the generic market and increasing the cost of manufacturing generic medicines.
To date, several policies and measures have been enacted to promote the use of generic drugs by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in Japan, with some moderate success seen in increasing the share of generic drugs (18.7% in 2007 to 22.8% in 2011 in volume share) [ 1- 5].
4) What are the barriers to increasing the use of generic medications?
Increasing the price for generic oncology drugs would have a negligible impact on overall health care costs.
Her research showed that "increasing the acceptance of generic medications is more complicated than just educating people about their equal efficacy," she said.
The sensitivity analysis showed annual mean savings for the Italian NHS ranging from 12.6 million €, -1.5 % compared to the base case scenario (decreasing all the rates of transition used in the simulation, and increasing the cost of generic drugs) to 76.0 million €, -9.1 % (increasing all the rates of transition used in the simulation, and decreasing the cost of generic and new drugs).
Notably, where participants had some or good knowledge of the research process and where there was in-depth discussion (ie, during focus groups), participants were more likely to prefer generic consent, a finding that has also been identified elsewhere in the literature 37 and supports the need for information and education if increasing the acceptability of generic consent is deemed desirable.
The sensitivity analysis results, showed annual mean savings for the INHS ranging from 12.6 million €, -1.5 % compared to the base case scenario (decreasing all the rates of transition used in the simulation, and increasing the cost of generic drugs) to 76.0 million €, -9.1 % (increasing all the rates of transition used in the simulation, and decreasing the cost of generic and new drugs) (Table 5).
At a given distance from the phenotypic switch, increasing the strength of a generic perturbation increased the probability that cells would switch into the alternative state.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.07935.009 10.7554/eLiFigure3 figureigure 3—figure supplement 1. Increasing the strength of a generic perturbation increases the probability that cells will switch into the alternative phenotypic state.
