The Working Group on Immunoglobulins, attended by the Ministry of Health, the Italian Medicines Agency, the National Blood Center, the representatives of the Regions and Farmindustria, officially took office with a first virtual meeting.
The Group's objective is to deal with the supply of plasma-derived drugs in a coordinated and organic way, intervening in advance in the event of potential shortages to guarantee the availability of these drugs and therapeutic continuity to patients who really need them.
"The approach chosen to address this issue was the same one that AIFA has successfully applied for other problems such as the distributive unavailability of drugs, linked to causes of a different matrix - comments the General Manager of AIFA Nicola Magrini - The presence of the same the table of all public and private parties interested in such an important issue can be the basis for achieving operational results already in the short term, for the benefit of the country and for the protection of patients ".
“We have already identified lines of action to prevent shortages”, affirms the director of the CNS Vincenzo De Angelis: “to get as close as possible to self-sufficiency, we must first of all act to increase the collection of plasma. We also need systems to maximize the appropriateness of clinical-therapeutic use, and an improvement in industrial technologies that allow us to increase production yields ".
In Italy, the plasma collected from donors is sufficient to cover about 75% of the national immunoglobulin requirement, with very marked differences in self-sufficiency between the regions. The rest of the drugs are sourced on the international market. Plasma collected in the USA is used for production, a country that collects 67% of the world's plasma. In recent days, some patient associations have reported their fears about the possible future difficulties in accessing therapies with polyvalent immunoglobulins, linked to the reduction in collections caused by the pandemic. The issue was addressed during the first meeting of the Group, which was also attended by representatives of the GAEF (Group of Farmindustria Hemoderivatives Companies), who will be regular interlocutors at the table.
The Working Group will also liaise with representatives of patient associations.