OBJECTIVE: Infliximab is a biologic drug administered in medical setting and has biosimilars like Infliximab-dyyb and Infliximab-abda are used in the US for the treatment of multiple diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, plaque psoriasis, ulcerative colitis, and crohn’s disease. Our study aim is to identify and observe the change in persistence of infliximab and its two biosimilars for above mentioned diseases.

METHODS: We have used Standard Kaplan-Meier (KM) analysis, which is frequently used to estimate the treatment persistence. We have obtained data from one of the largest US managed care organizations, representing about 15% of commercially insured lives and 23% of Medicare Part D beneficiaries. When therapy was started, with one-year clean period of the drug was considered as the index date. We have derived the index date from the first claim, and those patients has been followed for 12 months from the index date. With the medication gap of 60 days and continuous eligibility of patients for 12 months, we got the claims data of these drugs for the above-mentioned diseases.

RESULTS: We observed that Infliximab has better persistence than other 2 biosimilars, but overall, it is quite low. Persistence of Infliximab for Crohn’s disease is 43% after 2 months and 20% after 12 months, and for other 3 diseases it is around less than 10% after 12 months. After 12 months, the persistence for all the diseases is less than 7% for Infliximab-dyyb and Infliximab-abda. CONCLUSION: Lower persistency of Infliximab and its biosimilars suggest lower adherence of physician administered, medical benefit drugs. Other factors like treatment switches and administrative burden of reimbursement of medical benefit drugs should be evaluated. This can help manufacturers, payers, and providers to make changes in their awareness campaigns of drugs and try to increase the persistence.