March 30 (Reuters) – Eli Lilly wants the UK to regularly raise NHS drug prices and phase out a multi-billion-pound rebate scheme if it is to resume investment, its international businesses president Patrik Jonsson told the Financial Times.
In an interview published on Monday, Jonsson said he was in talks with UK ministers and was “optimistic” about reaching an agreement by the summer for the country to pay more for its medicines.
The discussions also cover “innovative” pricing plans that would link payments for anti-obesity drugs to whether patients become well-enough to return to work, Jonsson said.
Medicine prices in the UK had been “far too low for far too long, and even with the current threshold, we are not back to where we started more than 20 years ago,” he added.
“Everyone deserves access to the best and most innovative treatments, and our changes to medicine pricing will make sure thousands of NHS patients gain faster access to new treatments,” the British Department of Health and Social Care said.
“We remain fully committed to delivering the UK-US Pharmaceutical Agreement, including the changes to the NICE cost-effectiveness threshold.”
Lilly raised the UK list price of its weight-loss treatment Mounjaro by up to 170% in August 2025, saying it had initially set prices “significantly below” those in its three other major European markets to prevent delays in NHS access.
(Reporting by Chandni Shah in Bengaluru; Editing by Sumana Nandy)
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