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Samsung Biologics, the largest biotechnology company in South Korea, has announced plans to establish its first U.S. manufacturing facility in Rockville. The announcement is a follow up to meetings held earlier this year between Governor Moore, Maryland Commerce Secretary Harry Coker, and Samsung Biologics leadership during the governor's international trade and investment mission to Japan and South Korea. Read more at Business.Maryland.Gov

In every therapeutic journey, there is a moment when the science becomes something more than a concept. It becomes a possibility. That moment doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because a trusted partner knows how to take a company’s vision, protect it, scale it, and move it toward the patient with purpose. In the BioHealth Capital Region, few organizations embody this better than ABL; a CDMO that has built a reputation for doing things differently. ABL’s approach is roote

Korean biotechnology company, Nature Cell, is planning to open a stem cell facility in Baltimore, bringing 500 new jobs, the governor announced Tuesday. The 100,000 square foot manufacturing facility will be located at 1401 Severn Street in the mixed-use Gaslight Square complex. The facility will be completed by 2031 in two phases, according to the governor's office. Read the full article on CBS News .

If Americans want to pay less for prescription drugs, there is no way to do it without reforming the Pharmacy Benefit Manager industry. Congress should do so by the end of this year. The PBMs, once known for reducing drug costs, no longer exist. Literally, they are no longer independent companies. They sit inside the insurance giants that own them. Cash machines to help health conglomerates hit quarterly numbers. Read the full article at DC Journal .

A new Health Affairs study has confirmed that UnitedHealth Group — the nation’s largest health care conglomerate — is doing more than dominating the market; it’s playing by a different set of rules. Researchers Daniel Arnold of Brown University and Brent Fulton of UC Berkeley analyzed new federal “Transparency in Coverage” data and found that UnitedHealth’s insurance arm, UnitedHealthcare, pays its own Optum physicians 17% more on average than it pays other doctors for the

More than half of American adults manage multiple chronic conditions. The prevalence is enough to strain the U.S. healthcare system and challenge patient access to new treatments. To compound the issue, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and others siphon nearly half of every dollar spent on brand-name drugs, driving up costs for patients. Read the full article on the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease .

The conclusion of the longest government shutdown in history and rising political acrimony rightly receives a great deal of attention but this focus makes it easy to overlook areas where beneficial legislation is politically possible. The broad political agreement that it is necessary to reform how pharmacy benefit managers (PBM) operate exemplifies the potential bipartisan opportunities. Read the full article on Forbes .

Although for patients the outcome of both conflicts is the same — confusion about coverage and care access — the disputes at the center of each is different. The insurer’s dispute with CWC is a familiar story — the women’s healthcare provider wants payment increases for services under commercial, Medicaid, and Medicare Advantage plans. Allegations of inadequate reimbursements have been at the center of contract disputes between payers and providers for years, with providers

In its first report on the 340B drug discount program’s effect on the budget, the Congressional Budget Office revealed that a previously obscure federal program originally meant to help a few dozen safety-net hospitals has exploded into a multibillion-dollar subsidy for thousands of nonprofit hospitals, driving up healthcare costs for patients — burdening taxpayers and contributing to the federal deficit — while delivering little measurable benefit to patients in need. Read

Maryland’s low-income taxpayers are required to utilize for- profit pharmacies in Hawaii and California. Pharmacy Benefit Management (PBM) owned and chain drug store contract pharmacies benefit from a federal program intended to support low-income Maryland taxpayers. Read the full report on the Pioneer Institute .

The 340B Drug Pricing Program was created to provide safety-net providers (known as covered entities) access to discounted outpatient drugs. However, 340B has evolved from a modestly sized program to the second-largest drug-purchasing program in the U.S., with drug purchases totaling $66.3 billion in 2023. Read the full report at the USC Leonard D. Schaeffer Institute for Public Policy & Government Service .

The 340B Drug Pricing Program is a federal program in which manufacturers provide heavily discounted drugs to qualifying hospitals and clinics. Despite claims by its advocates that it is “free”, it increases healthcare costs for employers and their workers due to lost drug reabates. New research has estimated the financial impact of the 340B program on each state. Read the full report on IQVIA .

President Trump is working to reshape the country’s manufacturing economy in the “America First” image through a combination of hardening domestic supply chains against hostile countries and creating economic opportunity for American workers. Ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, Republicans hope a stiff cocktail of foreign policy maneuvers, tax relief and regulatory reform will make MAGA dreams a reality. Read the full article at The Washington Times .

Today, 63 million Americans — one in four adults — provide care to a loved one living with age-related decline, disability or serious illness like cancer or heart disease. For these caregivers, reliable access to innovative medicines often marks the line between stability and crisis. Unfortunately, that access is now threatened by Washington’s latest drug pricing proposal: the so-called “Most Favored Nation” model. Read the full article on The Well News .

I often tell my American friends that they need not speculate about the effects of price controls on medicines. All they must do is ask us Europeans. If long wait times for care, diminished access to prescription medications, and less medical innovation sound good, price controls are the way to go. Read the full article at RealClear Health .

MFN pricing policies pose a significant threat to U.S. innovation, economic growth, and patient access by undermining research incentives, delaying life-saving treatments, and jeopardizing millions of high-skilled jobs. Read the full article at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce .

Where given the authority, PDABs attempt to address affordability challenges by creating and imposing a UPL for drugs deemed “unaffordable” . However, physicians surveyed believe UPLs will limit access to drugs patients rely on and for whom therapeutic alternatives are clinically inappropriate. Physicians who participated in this study communicated their concern with respect to the impact UPLs will have on providers’ prescribing habits, including the avoidance of prescribing

For years, states have implemented various legislative and regulatory policies to lower prescription drug costs in an effort to improve affordability. The first wave was pharmacy benefit management (PBM) transparency rules theorizing that greater transparency would promote comparative shopping to reduce prices. Then, the second wave focused on manufacturer price transparency reporting requirements. Legislators believed that requiring manufacturers to report and justify price

Six years ago, Maryland made national headlines by creating the first-ever Prescription Drug Affordability Board (PDAB). It was heralded as a groundbreaking step to make prescription drugs more affordable and give families some breathing room at the pharmacy counter. But today, the results are impossible to ignore — and deeply disappointing. Despite all the promises, the PDAB hasn’t lowered a single prescription cost. Not one. Instead, it risks adding more red tape and fewer