The Pharmacy Benefit Managers in the US are playing a major role in providing healthcare facilities to their medical insurers at very nominal pricing. CVS Health Corp (NYSE:CVS) has also announced that it is excluding the high-priced drugs from its formulary and is planning to add low-cost generics and biosimilars to replace them.

CVS Health said in a statement: “We expect to remove 35 products from our standard formulary including 10 hyperinflationary drugs.” The PBM will evaluate the drugs on quarterly basis depending upon inflation and cost effectiveness, upon availability of the generic or biosimilar, it will remove the branded molecule from the formulary.

The whole plan will be effective from January 1, 2017 and it will give a dent to majority of giant companies such as Sanofi’s diabetes drug Lantus and Neupogen by Amgen. The generics and biosimilar of aforementioned drugs are available in the market clinching their share. In the replacement of Sanofi’s Lantus, CVS may prefer Eli Lilly’s Basaglar from the beginning of 2017, as it is the cheaper version of Lantus.

There are approximately 20 million insurers getting benefit from CVS Health and keeping in view the step taken by the PBM, it will affect majority of branded drugs. Barclays said: “CVS’s removal list grew to 155 [medications or treatments] in 2017, as compared to 124 in 2016 and 95 in 2015.”

Furthermore, CVS has announced that it will include the latest biosimilar Zarxio developed by Novartis in its formulary in order to replace costly Neupogen. This action of the PBM will increase the saving for the patient. It is also planning to exclude 35 products in 2017 and is thinking to include in its formulary generics and biosimilars of blockbuster drugs, such as Gleevec and others. Recently, Express Scripts has also announced to remove costly drugs from its list in 2017, replacing them with the generics as well as biosimilars, in order to keep the burden less on the patients.