Lucky punch or highly scientific recipe?
Recently launched drugs like Sovaldi or Imbruvica are considered to be huge commercial punches of the past decade. But what is the secret behind those success stories? Trinity partners, a US-American health care consulting company, has published their annual Trinity Drug Index lately in which they tried to analyze the correlation of financial achievements, marketing efforts, research and development investment and drug characteristics like innovative change.
Unsurprisingly, the results were able to show that drugs tend to turn out as a commercial victory in case they were significantly different from preexisting treatments. Gilead’s hep C blockbuster Sovaldi can be mentioned as the best example for this finding. At the time point Sovaldi was launched there was no comparable drug with such a clinical benefit and a smaller number of side effects available.
So far so good, these conclusions can be considered as common sense but in addition the Trinity Index revealed much more highly informative data.
Further data suggest that the commercial success is highly bound to the number of competitors in a field of use. In the case of Kynamro, a drug to treat a rare hereditary disease, the relative high number of therapeutic alternatives and the low patient population limited sales numbers significantly despite a lower price and equivalent clinical data.
Reviewing all these facts when Pomalyst was introduced, a highly expensive drug with no remarkable therapeutical gain, the dice were loaded against a commercial triumph. But nevertheless, against all expectations Pomalyst exceeded all performance predictions. But what was the key to its outstanding performance? The answer lies within the complexity of drug sales.
In the case of Pomalyst the drug hit a market with an unmet need of medical alternatives, a severely ill patient collective and a medical field where high drug prices above the average tend to be well accepted. Finally, all these different factors together contributed to a tremendous win.
Last but not least, we look at the extremely competitive market of primary care drugs. This group contains drugs for treatment of diabetes, COPD and other.
The Trinity report states two big issues with primary care drugs. On one hand the market is exceptionally oversaturated and crowded and therefore only significant innovative approaches might succeed but they are always accompanied by the threat of generics. On the other hand the expenses for clinical trials are higher than in any other field of drug development and therefore limit prospects of success. As a rare and most recent exception SGLT-2 inhibitor Jardiance has to be mentioned which has been recently acknowledged by FDA to lower the risk of cardiovascular diseases in patients suffering from diabetes.
Tremendously interesting was the fact that in cases of head-to-head competition or enormous oversupply an advanced marketing strategy seemed to tip balance and pave the way to achieve sale goals.
Finally, the report concludes that drug markets are under constant change and thus pharmaceutical companies have to expect that especially the field of highly specific drugs like biologicals will become more crowded and more competitive and therefore financial outcomes will also shift.
Further information can be found on: http://www.trinitypartners.com/files/8614/7916/0110/TRY30037Fpress.pdf