After months of preparation, three teams of Pharm.D. students faced off for the chance to compete for a third straight national championship.
Three student teams, hoping to represent the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy at the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy Foundation’s Pharmacy and Therapeutics Competition, presented at the School’s P&T Local Competition on Jan 26.
To determine which team will participate in the national AMCP competition, the teams presented clinical and economic recommendations for Radius Health’s TYMLOS® (abaloparatide), a promising but expensive new parathyroid hormone analogue for the treatment of severe osteoporosis in postemenopausal women.
The winning team of PY3 students Adam O’Neil, Seth Cook, Chelsea Day and Rachel Black now aim to become one of the eight finalist teams that will present their analysis of TYMLOS® at the AMCP Managed Care & Specialty Pharmacy Annual Meeting in San Diego this March.
The national AMCP competition provides a firsthand experience into the complex practice of managing the formulary process. Students from the UNC chapter of AMCP captured first place in both 2017 and 2018.
O’Neil, the UNC AMCP chapter president, has competed in the School’s P&T competiton alongside Cook and Black three times and said he’s learned valuable lessons from the experience.
“While the workload was still as daunting as ever, the reward of being able to understand how clinical and economic evidence is translated into formulary decision-making was well worth it,” O’Neil said. “The competition exercises widely transferrable skills, and I implore any pharmacy student who wants an understanding of how to measure the true ‘market value’ of a drug to give it a shot.”
The student teams prepared for the P&T competiton for months. Participants in the competiton participated in P&T “Boot Camp,” a series of five workshops taught by managed care and industry professionals, in October and November.
In December and January, the teams prepared their analyses of TYMLOS®, which included elaborate monographs featuring evaluation of clinical and economic evidence for the drug and presentations of their formulary recommendations.
Event organizer and PY2 Alice Cheng — whose team placed second in the Local Competition and also included Jefferson Pike, Jr., Ben Penley and Victoria Mitchell — said participating in the event helped open her eyes to the P&T field of pharmacy.
“Since enrolling at this School of Pharmacy, I was fascinated by the professional and technical initiatives UNC AMCP provided its membership,” she said. “I’m truly honored to have played a role in putting together both the Boot Camp and Local Competition this year.”