Bincy Abraham, MD, on Biosimilars: Playing the Switch Game

In this video, Dr Abraham discusses a few highlights from her recent presentation on biosimilars from the Advances in Inflammatory Bowel Disease 2021 regional conference.

Bincy Abraham, MD, is a professor of medicine at Houston Methodist Weill Cornell Medical School in Houston, Texas.

TRANSCRIPT:

Dr. Bincy Abraham:  Hi, everyone. I really hope you enjoyed Advances in IBD Regionals for June. I'm Dr. Bincy Abraham, Professor of Clinical Medicine here at Houston Methodist in Houston, Texas. During this conference, I presented on the topic of "Biosimilars -- Playing the Switch Game."

As you may already be aware, more insurances are requiring us to use biosimilars in our patients. In this talk, I discussed what biosimilars are, how they came to market, and approval by the FDA, and its benefits of cost savings for health care as a whole.

I provided data from numerous studies that show that biosimilars are, in fact, similar in efficacy, safety, and immunogenicity. The key takeaway from this presentation is that we should feel completely comfortable in the use of biosimilars in our practice, as this will be the new future as more biosimilars get approved in different medication brands and classes over time.

We should treat it as the originator product, in that if a patient is not responding to the biosimilar, you should not switch back to the originator or to a different biosimilar.

Similarly, if the patient has developed anti-drug antibodies to the originator biologic, or to the biosimilar, we're going to assume that they're going to have the same antibodies to the other product as well, because these epitopes are, again, similar.

I hope you enjoyed this presentation. Hopefully, you learned a lot of biosimilars and feel comfortable using in your practice as well.