I was honored to be chosen as a public servant recipient of the Delaware Bio Award at a banquet last month.

I was pleased to work with Sen. Bethany Hall-Long and Rep. Mike Barbieri to secure the passage of Senate Bill 118, which passed unanimously in the General Assembly last year. The legislation helped Delaware anticipate some of the regulatory issues biosimilars present ahead of their introduction to the market.

When a range of groups, from the Arthritis Foundation to the International Cancer Advocacy Network, testified that biosimilars offer the hope of breakthroughs in treatment, I wanted to make sure Delaware was ready.

The biomedicine and pharmaceutical industries are a big part of our state economy, and they do important work here and around the globe to improve lives and public health. We should be incentivizing ingenuity and I believe that when the FDA deems a drug safe, we should help make it available to the people who need it.

With SB 118, we strived to strike the appropriate balance between giving doctors flexibility in treating patients freely with a need for them to provide guidance to pharmacies as to how to dispense these new medications. Because of the uniqueness of these drugs – which are made from living cells – the automatic substitution for a generic drug can’t always work. That’s why this bill requires physicians and pharmacists to share data through dispensation records and substitution tracking.

I thank Delaware Bio for the award and I am humbled by it, because I know it took the hard work of a lot of people – from the public sector to industry experts to medical professionals – to get this groundbreaking legislation passed through our General Assembly unanimously.