Mexiletine is a long-known drug used for the treatment of arrhythmias and repurposed in the 1980s for patients with the rare condition nondystrophic myotonia (NDM). Over the past few years, the price of mexiletine in Europe increased significantly after the product was registrated as an orphan drug for NDM.

The Dutch platform Medicine for Society used AIM’s fair pricing model to calculate a cost-based price for mexiletine for adult patients with NDM. The objective was to use information on development costs to assess if price increases were justified. Using AIM’s tool, the team concluded that prices in Europe as calculated with the AIM model are substantially lower than current list prices of mexiletine, and suggest that “cost-based pricing models can support fair pricing discussions and reimbursement decision making for repurposed orphan drugs when reliable information about costs can be retrieved”.

You can find the study here.