There's a billion dollar battle looming over generic versions of statin drugs.
Newhouse News Service reports that "Merck's Zocor, the No. 2 cholesterol-lowering medicine, loses its patent protection in June, opening the door for inexpensive generic copies that could ultimately save consumers billions of dollars."
"We are sitting on a monumental change that's about to occur," George Paz, chief executive of the pharmacy benefit management company Express Scripts, says in the Newhouse story. "That is going to be a significant opportunity for our members and our patients, our clients, to save money."
The story continues: "A 10-milligram tablet of the most popular brand-name cholesterol fighters, including Lipitor, Crestor and Vytorin, usually costs more than $2, while generic Zocor, or simvastatin, is expected to cost about 35 cents.
To stave off what could be mass defections to generic Zocor, most of the big players in the cholesterol market - Pfizer, Schering-Plough, AstraZeneca and even Merck - have mobilized armies of sales reps to visit cardiologists, attend medical conventions and flood doctors' offices with free samples."
That's one huge advantage the brand names have over the generics. What's the last time a physician opened his/her drawer to give you a sample and handed you a generic?
But Newhouse reports that the future will be even more interesting: "The drama surrounding Zocor may be just a preview of things to come. Nearly 70 branded drugs with annual U.S. sales of $46 billion - including 19 blockbusters with annual sales over $1 billion each - are set to go off patent by 2010. Once a generic version goes on the market, it typically cuts the brand-name's sales by 80 percent within the first year."
Posted by schwitz at April 5, 2006 10:18 AM | TrackBack