GUARD

STAT’s Pharmalittle warns that excluding rare-disease drugs from Medicare’s GUARD pilot could erase most planned savings, highlights MFN pricing pressure, and notes that AstraZeneca–Bristol Myers Squibb merger talks appear off.

Exempting orphan (rare-disease) therapies from CMS MFN-style drug-pricing pilots could largely erase expected savings, fueling biotech lobbying to exclude orphan drugs from GLOBE and GUARD.