Half of the net proceeds will go to Jazz; it remains unclear who will get the remaining sum. Jazz did not reveal the buyer of the voucher.
Jazz Pharmaceuticals has offloaded a priority review voucher to an unnamed buyer for $200 million, marking the highest sale price in almost a decade. Meanwhile, Congress still has not renewed the PRV program.
The Irish biotech announced the sale during a company presentation Wednesday at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, revealing that it will take home half of the net proceeds. It is unclear whom the other half will go to or who the voucher was sold to. Jazz also did not say exactly when the deal was reached, revealing only that it happened last year.
Jazz came by its priority review voucher in August 2025 when the FDA approved its oral protease activator Modeyso as the first drug for diffuse midline glioma, a rare brain tumor. Jazz obtained Modeyso with its $935 takeover of Chimerix in March last year.
Rare disease priority review vouchers give drugmakers the opportunity to cut down review times for their drug applications. From the typical 10 months under standard timelines, submissions designated for priority review can result in a decision within six months. These tickets are awarded to companies that secure regulatory approvals for therapies addressing rare diseases, and serve as an incentive for the industry to pump resources into such conditions.
In September 2024, however, Congress failed to pass legislation that would have renewed the voucher program, and the FDA in December that year wound down the scheme. Dordaviprone secured a rare pediatric disease designation from the FDA before the voucher program expired, making it eligible for the ticket, which Chimerix requested when it filed the approval application in December 2024.
From a low of $21.2 million in June 2023, these priority tickets surged to $158 million in August 2024, right before the program’s failure to be renewed, and then dropped to $150 million in February last year, according to an analysis by BioSpace.
In September last year, proposed legislation to renew the voucher program made it out of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, sparking hopes that the FDA would soon be able to award these tickets again.
But a final reauthorization law continues to languish. Last month, the Senate did not pass similar legislation that would have restarted the voucher program, held back by disagreements between senators. According to reporting from Endpoints News at the time, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) voted against a proposal from Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) to reauthorize the program, instead choosing to package a voucher provision into a broader healthcare bill that Mullin and other Republicans did not support.
