Abbott To Withdraw Two Premium Stents Following Regulator’s Price Cap
Abbott said very few patients used the two withdrawn stents in India.
Abbott India Ltd. became the first company to withdraw two stent variants after the pharmaceutical pricing regulator capped prices in India.
The healthcare company will withdraw 'Alpine drug eluting stent' and 'Absorb dissolving stent' from the country as higher input costs would mean it would not be sustainable, Abbott India told BloombergQuint in an emailed statement.
The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority had capped the prices of coronary stents, a tubular insertion used to open up a blocked artery in the heart, after finding that hospitals were overcharging patients for the technology. The regulator had priced basic metal stents at Rs 7,260 and slow drug discharging ones at Rs 29,600 apiece.
Abbott said that it had applied to NPPA for withdrawing the two stents, which it said were used by a “very small percentage of patients in India”. The company was “disappointed” that the NPPA did not differentiate in coronary stent technology, the statement said.
India's Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation had issued a medical device alert on ‘Absorb’ and advised patients using it to report any adverse effects. This came after Abbott issued a safety notice restricting the dissolving stent’s use in select centres in Europe.
The company will keep its products available in India while the NPPA reviews its withdrawal application.
Shares of Abbott India Ltd. closed 1.3 percent lower while the benchmark Nifty 50 index fell 0.19 percent.