Revamping best-selling drugs to combat patent cliff has limits

As the looming patent cliff approaches, immoderate large blockbuster drugs are acceptable to suffer their exclusivity, with pharma companies making moves to effort and trim the impact.

Patent expiry is simply a improvement that haunts each pharmaceutical company, with the nonaccomplishment of marketplace exclusivity often causing a melodramatic dip successful a company’s profits. This tin beryllium peculiarly challenging for companies whose cause is 1 of their best-sellers – having the imaginable to hitch billions from gross figures.

With a peculiarly ample question of cause patent expiries acceptable to deed the manufacture successful the coming years, the spotlight connected the authorities of biopharma pipelines has intensified.

To combat the challenges associated with the patent cliff, pharma companies are progressively licensing caller and promising assets, with galore looking to China for this arsenic the state enhances its output of imaginable first- and best-in-class pipeline assets.

However, companies are besides revamping their best-selling medicines – improving aspects similar durability, way of administration, potency, tolerability, and more, to widen their marketplace imaginable successful the look of biosimilar competition.

This inclination is powerfully observed successful the oncology and ophthalmology sectors, which person seen a wide scope of drugs get an upgrade upon an approaching patent cliff. This includes MSD’s best-selling crab asset, Keytruda (pembrolizumab) – which precocious got the subcutaneous (SC) upgrade – arsenic good arsenic Bayer and Regeneron’s longer-acting Eylea follow-on, Eylea HD (aflibercept), which was approved successful 2023.

In speech with Pharmaceutical Technology, experts antecedently noted that the modulation from intravenous (IV) to SC was a “major shift” successful the oncology assemblage backmost successful 2023.

Now, analysts and experts alike clasp varying opinions connected the existent and aboriginal marketplace imaginable of specified therapies successful oncology, ophthalmology and beyond.

With a wide scope of larger pharma companies introducing updated, SC formulations of their erstwhile IV-only therapies, patients crossed the globe are gaining entree to medications that connection amended diligent centricity, portion perchance reducing the clip spent receiving treatment.

According to Jack Cuthbertson, oncology expert astatine GlobalData, the genitor institution of Pharmaceutical Technology, aesculapian systems could besides reap the benefits of these caller formulations.

“Cancer attraction clinics are often constricted by ‘chair times’, oregon the magnitude of clip it takes to present treatment,” Cuthbertson says. “New formulations trim this from hours to minutes, resulting successful important wide savings for healthcare work providers.”