Four Enlightenments of 16 strongest new drugs to enterprises

One way to measure the importance of a new drug is how quickly it can replace an existing product on the market, which is a key indicator Strong commercial promotion usually indicates that a new drug will become a major source of revenue for enterprises EP vantage has released a list of the 16 most powerful drugs on the market, from which we can not only review the performance of some successful new drugs in the past, but also summarize some characteristics There was a time when the era of drugs for common diseases came to an end The success of drug marketing depended not only on the quality of new drugs, but also on the market scale of their treatment of diseases Drugs such as heart disease, depression, diabetes or arthritis, which are relatively cheap but have a large patient base, have always dominated the market In addition, pharmaceutical companies will establish a large sales force to promote doctors to prescribe these drugs The more successful the initial performance of a new drug on the market, the more likely the drug is to become the company's main source of revenue during the patent protection period A typical success story is Pfizer's Lipitor Although it is the fifth approved statins, the superior efficacy of Lipitor, together with the widely accepted importance of statins for heart disease patients, set a sales volume of US $1.54 billion (adjusted for inflation, the same below) in the first 12 months of its marketing in the United States Two years later, Pfizer's arthritis drug Celebrex broke the record, with sales of $2.3 billion in its first year However, in the past 20 years since the advent of celecoxib, there has not been a new drug for common diseases with an initial annual sales volume of $1 billion On the contrary, the pharmaceutical industry has witnessed the rise of high priced drugs in small markets In the future, Gilead's hepatitis C drugs, harvoni, sovaldi and epclusa, will be among the top three high priced drugs in the small market, with sales of US $10.67 billion, US $9.02 billion and US $3.22 billion respectively in the first year The market dominance of these three products is determined by a variety of factors: first, these drugs can cure hepatitis C and greatly meet the clinical needs; second, the high price of these drugs in the early stage of marketing (harvoni price up to $94000, sovaldi price up to $84000) promotes high income However, these are only catalog prices, and as the market competition becomes more and more fierce, the price reached by drug payers and enterprises has dropped to less than $30000 Hepatitis C is not the only representative The 6th and 8th place on the list are tecfidera and ocrevus, the multiple sclerosis drugs of Biogen and Roche, with sales of $1.84 billion and $1.68 billion respectively in the first year It's similar to hepatitis C: high prices and millions of patients The same is true for a new wave of anticancer drugs: Pfizer's breast cancer treatment ibrance ranked 13th with its first annual sales of US $1.16 billion, while BMS's opdivo ranked 16th with us $870 million A good beginning is not guaranteed to be far from worrying However, the strong sales of new drugs in the first year of marketing does not necessarily indicate a bright future Three of the top ten drugs on the list have been withdrawn from the market, two of which are hepatitis C drugs In 2011, vertex launched incivek, with first year sales of $1.72 billion Two years later, J & J launched olysio, which generated more than $2 billion in sales in its first year However, the two products were soon overtaken by the next generation of hepatitis C drugs from Gilead and abbvie Finally, fortai and Johnson & Johnson stopped selling the two drugs in 2014 and 2018, respectively The No 10 osteoarthritis drug, Vioxx, has been withdrawn from the market due to potential cardiovascular side effects It is worth mentioning that the problem of the drug also affects the prescription quantity of celecoxib, which belongs to COX-2 enzyme inhibitor, and the sales volume of celecoxib has not exceeded the record in the first 12 months Under various factors, the transfer of R & D enthusiasm of new drugs can set high price and be used in the medium or small-scale patient groups, which greatly affects the direction of R & D investment of pharmaceutical companies First of all, the clinical trials of drugs for rare diseases or targeted cancer treatment are much smaller than the large trials needed to obtain drug approval for diabetes, heart disease and other drugs Second, there is no need for a large sales force to promote these drugs, because there are far fewer doctors who prescribe them Finally, drug pricing is attractive This influence can be seen from the change of research focus of pharmaceutical enterprises Pfizer, for example, has a solid foundation in antibiotics, cardiovascular disease and neuroscience, and now its research focuses on anti-tumor, immunity, liver disease, rare diseases and vaccines - all of which are areas of great clinical demand and an effective drug can maintain high prices The initial strong performance of harvoni's listing is difficult to surpass, but given the continuous breakthroughs in medical technology, the list is likely to show a new face of expensive prices in the next few years.