A recent report by the news outlet Bloomberg found that prices for many popular prescription medications have risen by more than twice the rate of inflation in recent years—a claim the head of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization called a "false alarm."

Bloomberg examined 39 medicines with global sales of more than $1 billion annually and calculated their prices from 2009 to 2015, taking into account the estimated discounts offered by their producers. The news service concluded that the price of 30 medications increased by more than double the rate of inflation in that time frame.

Bloomberg said many drug companies disputed the analysis but none provided data to counter the conclusions. http://bloom.bg/29jnvCI

Rising drug prices have been a sore point for the pharmaceutical industry since "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli called attention to the issue last year when his company increased the price of a potentially life-saving medication from $13.50 to $750 a tablet. In response, BIO took the unusual step of booting Shkreli's company from its membership. It has also spent much of the last few months fending off calls by lawmakers to rein in drug prices through regulation.

In a June 29 blog post, BIO CEO Jim Greenwood said Bloomberg's analysis was flawed because it failed "to take in the full picture of biopharmaceutical successes and failures," used guesses instead of hard data, and "just plain gets the facts wrong."

"When it comes to the methodology of this analysis, it seems that for Bloomberg, the absence of evidence is evidence," he said.

Among other things, Greenwood said that up to 90 percent of pharmaceutical investment goes to clinical research that ultimately fails. He also takes issue with a claim in the article that rebates are not keeping up with rising drug prices.

"I'm proud of our industry—both the successes and the failures that are so critical to advancing medicine," he said. "But it's simply wrong to attempt to report on the most commercially successful drugs without putting that information in context of the broader industry drug research ecosystem." http://bit.ly/29aRdpV

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