Late last month, President Donald Trump issued letters to Lilly CEO David Ricks and to the CEOs of roughly a dozen other large pharmaceutical companies, giving them until late September to cut the U.S. prices of certain drugs or the administration will “deploy every tool in our arsenal to protect American families.”

Eli Lilly said it would raise drug prices in Europe to "make them lower" in U.S., though the actual impact on most patients abroad remains unclear.

As Trump has pressured drugmakers to lower the cost of medicines in the U.S., the pharma industry has coalesced behind a message of rebalancing what nations pay to better reflect the innovation and value of drugmaking.