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Begun, the Humira Biosimilar Wars Have
Well, it finally happened. AbbVie put up the fight of its life and delayed all Humira biosimilars for a while, but the dam has broken. The highest-grossing drug of all-time now has direct competition, a mere seven years after its original patent expired. Various legal shenanigans saw that the cash cow was protected until now.
So, what’s the outcome? Headline prices will certainly drop, but how much the end user will see is the wildcard. This is a biologic therapy, not a simple pill, which means it is much more costly to produce.
It’s never going to be $100 per dose or anything like that. Current biosimilars are priced at about $995 every four weeks while the Mark Cuban Cost+ Pharmacy says they will charge more like $569 plus fees. So maybe about the same after those fees.
At least for anyone paying out of pocket, this will be a godsend. For people on insurance - probably won't matter too much. What a system!
Hooked a Big One
Last week we featured a blurb about a company using fish skin as a wound healing product. The next day, they were bought out for $1.3B.
That’s some serious skin in the game for Coloplast.
Perfect Fit
New company we added this week who is working on a bone fiber implant decided on the name Tetrous. Presumably because Zellduh didn’t have as much flair and Sooper Mareo Bruthers was too long. And yet somehow this wasn't the worst new name of the week...
Head Spinner
Longtime readers will know that as we add companies to our directory, we can be a bit judgmental when it comes to their name choices. And considering we list over 11,000 companies, we have seen some really bad names.
But every so often, even BPG is caught off guard.
Behold, a company working on natural killer T cells as an immuno-oncology treatment who named themselves NK:IO.
Let’s see – no reference to what they do, a punctuation mark that cannot be in a url, unknown pronunciation, all caps…it’s like the greatest hits of bad naming concepts.
Website looks good, logo is fine, but as for the name itself...it’s the holy grail: 0/10
Biotech Degrees
A thread on Reddit asked if biotech masters are a scam considering they tend to involve only coursework with no labs. While not exactly on topic, one commenter summarized the general industry attitudes in various biotech regions pretty perfectly:
"Everyone in Boston...will look down on anyone who didn’t go to MIT/Harvard/Stanford/Berkeley and will tell you you’ve got no chance in industry without lab experience from a famous lab. Everyone in SD for the most part don’t care about degrees. Everyone in RTP probably has HQ overseas and don’t care beyond having a US master’s or higher. Everyone in NYC and Chicago will tell you “it’s the next big biotech hub.” Everyone in SF/Silicon Valley are engineers telling biologists that biology is easy and just a coding problem they could solve in a day."
Nailed it! (Fire off your violent disagreements by hitting reply)
Approved != Better
You might think that newly approved drugs are better than existing therapies. And 41% of the time you'd be correct. But the rest of the time, not so much.
That does not mean these drugs shouldn't be approved - each medicine has different target populations, side effects, interactions with other drugs, etc.
But the general public probably assumes that newly approved drugs are more effective than older ones, and it is not generally the case.
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