Matt Herper -- Dead On -- On Statins, and Cardiology: Looking Ahead

Matt Herper, over at his Forbes pharma blog-space, has a solid look at cardiology drugs up, this morning -- he gets there by way of looking first at the current roster of diabetes drugs. Do go read it all, but this I found interesting, as it -- in a few paragraphs -- lays out what lies beyond the patent cliff, as additional risks for pharmaceutical manufacturers, in the current incarnation of the industry's business model:

. . . .All this creates a giant problem for drug companies. They've become accustomed to the sales of statins as they are now, after their benefit was widely proven, not to the niche drugs they started out with. But new drugs to find added benefit are requiring gigantic and expensive clinical trials of tens of thousands of cardiovascular patients. All the but the biggest pharmaceutical firms can't afford this. . . .Pharma's response has been to find small groups of very sick people for whom they can charge a lot of money. Successful new medicines increasingly tend to launch with an annual price of $100,000 per patient per year.

The next crop of cardiology drugs -- including blood thinners to prevent stroke, drugs to remove artery plaque, and medicines that reduce artery inflammation -- are being testing in these gigantic studies without more than a hunch that they'll work. If they fail, new heart treatments may have to wait until they can be genetically targeted to small populations that can really benefit. And one of the drug industry's biggest cash cows will be put out to pasture. . . .

Indeed -- it is not just Merck's $17.8 billion "at risk" over its global patent cliffs -- it is the possibility that nothing -- no current candidate in development, on which these companies are spending billions, in the aggregate (for large studies and vast ramp-ups), will succeed to even partially fill it. They may never make it onto the market, at all.

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