Healthcare Finance News | Rene Letourneau
NEW YORK CITY – New drugs in three multi-billion dollar categories will help pharmaceutical companies offset patent expirations and will ease pressure on credit rating outlooks, says a new report from Moody's Investors Service.
In its report, “R&D Breakthroughs Create Opportunities to Lift Flagging Revenues,” Moody’s paints an optimistic picture for pharma sales in 2012. "Recent research and development breakthroughs for three unique billion-dollar disease categories mean that drug companies such as Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Novartis and Johnson & Johnson will see new revenue streams that help offset losses from recent and imminent patents expirations," said Michael Levesque, a Moody's senior vice president and author of the report, in a statement.
Competition is brewing between Johnson & Johnson and Merck & Co. in the nearly $5 billion a year global market for hepatitis C drugs, noted the report. "Rapid advancements in drug development are changing the treatment of hepatitis C," said Levesque. "2012 is the first full year of sales for Vertex/Johnson & Johnson and Merck & Co., Inc.'s new hepatitis treatments, but we see Vertex/Johnson & Johnson handily winning the market share battle. Still, longer-term, we look to Gilead Sciences, which may be the first to market with an oral treatment that makes current interferon use obsolete."
Novartis will also continue to benefit from its introduction of the first oral drug to treat multiple sclerosis, Gilenya. Moody's expects global sales of Gilenya to rise 60 percent this year to approximately $800 million, although its safety is being scrutinized and new treatments from competitors Biogen Inc. and Sanofi are not far behind, noted the report. Teva Pharmaceuticals Ltd. will likely suffer as its blockbuster drug Copaxone loses market share to Gilenya and other new treatments.
In addition, two new drugs to prevent strokes in atrial fibrillation patients by Boehringer Ingelheim and Johnson & Johnson/Bayer AG are now on the market and could create a new category of blockbuster drugs, upsetting the 50-year-old market for warfarin, said Moody's. Still, Pfizer Inc. and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.'s pending drug Eliquis, currently under FDA priority review, could become the category leader.