Roche to Buy Spark Therapeutics at Double the Share Price; Medicare Reimbursement $850K/Patient

Roche will acquire Spark Therapeutics, maker of the $850,000 retinal drug Luxturna.   Roche will value the company at about $4.8B, double the market cap of the prior day.

See business news at Bloomberg, Biopharmadive, MedCity.

See my January 16, 2019, article on the details of how CMS prices Luxturna - here.  Hint - it's innocuous-sounding HCPCS code J3398.  Million-dollar drugs get their reimbursement five alphanumeric characters at a time, just like everybody else.

click to enlarge

__

Some other gene therapy stocks also rose 15-30%, here.

In other news, CMS released a draft national coverage policy for CAR-T biologicals, February 15, here.

For a WSJ article on paying for million-dollar biologicals by installment, re Bluebird Bio, here.