Arena's low-cost transfer of weight-loss drug belviq: changes in the pharmaceutical industry

Source: U.S - China Pharmaceutical source on January 5, 2017 [news event]: today, arena, an American biotechnology company, announced that it would sell its weight-loss drug belviq (generic name: Lorcaserin) to its partner Weicai at a low price of $23 million, and the latter might pay the former $80 million sales commission Weicai will own belviq's global equity and bear all development expenses, but arena will continue to produce the drug in its Swiss division [drug source analysis]: Belviq and other weight-loss drugs in the same period, such as Qysmia and Contrave, can be regarded as the victims of the transformation of Western drug payment system These drugs are generally optimistic when they are developed, and the peak sales are predicted to be more than $1 billion, but at present, there are no more than 50 million annual sales Qysmia is the only weight-loss drug that can reduce 10% of body weight, and poor sales are believed to be the failure of vivus to cooperate with large pharmaceutical companies to promote But the participation of big pharmaceutical companies has not changed the fate of the other two weight-loss drugs In July, arena cut 73% of its staff due to the poor sales of belviq, while contract lost its job with its partner Takeda due to orexigen's violation of FDA regulations, and then transferred the European market to the recently troubled Valeant The reason why these drugs were generally favored before is that under the old payment system, these drugs can be regarded as so-called heavyweight drugs Blockbuster drugs, on the surface, refer to products with annual sales of more than $1 billion, but in the original payment system, only common diseases can reach this sales scale Although the curative effect of these drugs is general (basically reducing 5% of body weight), it is estimated that the dosage will be large because there are many obese patients and obesity is one of the root causes of major health killers such as diabetes mellitus and heart disease Once upon a time, the marketing and promotion of such drugs were very important, so only large pharmaceutical companies were able to manage such drugs But in the past 10 years, the payment policy has undergone fundamental changes, and the demand for the value of drugs has become more and more strict The process of drug development is long, but the payment policy can be changed quickly, which makes the drugs unfortunately listed at the wrong time and place fall victim to environmental change There have been several recent cases of rule changes in the middle of such competitions A famous example is Takeda's DPP4 inhibitor alogliptin, which caught up with the FDA's requirement that all diabetes drugs have cardiovascular safety test data at the end of the clinical trial As a result, the competition that was close to the original was pulled down by the new deal for five years The change of the payment policy makes many people think that the heavy drug model is over, which means that products with slight curative effect and large number of users have no living space But the annual sales of more than 1 billion products is still the goal of manufacturers when they develop products, but now such products must have significant curative effect, but not necessarily many patients For example, nusinersen, a spinal muscular dystrophy drug launched last year, has a major market of more than 10000 patients, but its peak sales are estimated to be $3 billion, because each patient has to pay a high price of $750000 in the first year Of course, these weight-loss drugs have black box warnings, which greatly affect market absorption It is Novo Nordisk's weight-loss needle, lilalutide, that is more promising Injection as a weight-loss drug was unimaginable 20 years ago The medicine world has changed fundamentally.