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It may not have the flash and pizazz of psychiatric, cancer and heart drugs, but expect Eli Lilly and Co.’s osteoporosis franchise to steadily build itself to blockbuster status over the next decade.
That’s the upshot of a June 1 report from Massachusetts-based Decision Resources Inc.. which predicts that Lilly’s drug Forteo and a new drug from California-based Amgen Inc. will drive 4.3-percent annual growth in global sales of osteoporosis drugs from 2013-2018.
Forteo grew 10 percent last year to $778 billion in global sales. Decision Resources expects the double-digit rise to continue until Forteo is a $2-billion-a-year product by 2018.
Lilly already built an older osteoporosis drug, Evista, into a $1-billion-a-year blockbuster. But sales of that drug have been flat lately. And Lilly has been fighting fiercely to fend off patent challenges from generic drugmakers.
Waiting in the wings is Lilly’s experimental osteoporosis drug arzoxifene. If its clinical trial results come back favorably, Decision Resources expects it to reach $600 million in annual sales by 2018.
In April, Lilly reported that arzoxifene – known as a selective estrogen receptor modulator, or SERM – significantly increased bone mineral density in postmenopausal women.
“Interviewed experts indicate that arzoxifene is the most promising of the third-generation SERMs,” said Dr. Jeremy Goldman, a Decision Resources analyst. “If Phase III clinical trial data confirms this, we forecast that arzoxifene will become the market-leading SERM.”
Lilly’s trick, again, is figuring out how to keep its sales and profits up long before 2018 comes. It looks to lose 60 percent of its revenue between 2011 and 2014 as its five top sellers lose their patent protections.
Lilly’s best hope for near-term profits is prasugrel. The blood-thinner is now on the market in Europe but is still languishing before regulators at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
On Feb. 3, an FDA advisory panel unanimously recommended prasugrel for approval. But questions over the exclusion of a prasugrel critic from the panel – at Lilly’s request – appeared to have stalled the drug again.
Lilly will split all prasugrel revenue with its development partner on the drug, Japan-based Daiichi Sankyo Co. Ltd.
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