Launch Day! -- Euro Biosimilar to Merck's Remicade®

The estimate is that over the next decade, over $100 billion of value will be transferred away from branded makers, to the bio-similar producers, in the class of biologics overall.

It begins in earnest, for Merck, today. Here is Reuters on it:

. . . .Paul Greenland, head of biologics at Hospira, said that biosimilars are likely to be priced about 20-30 percent cheaper than originals.

Because biotech drugs are made from living cells it is impossible to manufacture exact copies, as happens with simple chemical medicines, so regulators have come up with the notion of approving products that are similar enough to do the job.

Remicade, which has annual European sales of about 2 billion euros ($2.3 billion), and the two biosimilar copies all contain an antibody known as infliximab. . . .

Probably at least a 15 per cent down bubble in sales of Remicade^®, over the next three years, in the EU then -- for Kenilworth. But it is priced into today's NYSE quote.