Amgen's John Kearney to lead ABPI's pricing negotiation team

The ABPI has unveiled the team of pharmaceutical executives that will represent the UK industry when pricing negotiations with the Department of Health formally begin.

The industry and DH will sit down next month to begin working out details of the UK's next pricing scheme, which will replace the current Prescription Pricing and Reimbursement Scheme (PPRS).

Heading up the ABPI's negotiating side will be team chair John Kearney, who is UK and Ireland general manager at biopharmaceutical company Amgen.

Serving with him will be GSK's UK general manager Erik van Snippenberg, Pfizer's UK managing director Jon Emms, UCB's British and Irish Isles managing director Matthew Speers and Alliance's executive director Pete Butterfield.

Keen to stress the inclusive nature of its team, the ABPI said it was representative of different sized companies as well as the different geographies within the UK industry.

The UK industry body will also provide a team of its own to support the pharma negotiators and this will be led by ABPI commercial director Alison Clough.

It is currently proposed that from 2014 a value-based pricing (VBP) system, incorporating a broader assessment of a product's worth, will be used to determine prices for medicines that are newly launched onto the UK market, while an updated version of the PPRS will be used to decide the price of branded drugs already available.