On Monday, Thomson Reuters released its annual Drugs to Watch report—an analysis of the biggest new products expected to enter the market this year. The intelligence firm ranked drugs that have just entered or are expected to soon enter the market based on projected 2019 sales. And if the predictions prove correct, then this year has almost four times as many future blockbusters entering the biopharma fray compared to 2014 (11 this year versus just three last year).
"This year's forecast identifies a substantial increase in the number of predicted blockbusters, inviting discussion around the current status of the blockbuster model," said Wendy Hamilton, global head of Life Sciences at Thomson Reuters.
Here are the 11 products Thomson Reuters expects to reach blockbuster status by 2019 (the top three are expected to even surpass the $3 billion mark by then). If you are a mobile user, you can expand the images in this post by clicking on them:
BioPharma Dive reported on a similar report released last year by EP Vantage, which also outlined 11 blockbuster candidates to watch. But the new Thomson Reuters analysis has two notable changes from that list. Specifically, the new analysis includes AbbVie's Viekira Pak and Merck's Gardasil 9 while dropping Actelion's pulmonary arterial hypertension drug Selexipag and Glaxo's severe asthma med mepolizumab.
That's not to say that those drugs won't also eventually achieve blockbuster status. But several industry events since EP Vantage's list was released likely changed Thomson Reuters' calculus, including the HCV Viekira Pak deal between AbbVie and Express Scripts and the emergence of Merck's HPV super-vaccine Gardasil 9, which protects against five additional HPV strains compared to regular Gardasil.
As you can see from the Thomson Reuters report's year-over-year sales projections, Bristol-Myers' cancer superstar Opdivo, Sanofi's PCSK9 cholesterol-lowering med Praluent, and Novartis' hotly-anticipated heart failure candidate LCZ696 are expected to dominate markets down the line (though they are still unlikely to reach the levels of specialty meds and biologics mainstays like AbbVie's Humira, Gilead's Sovaldi/Harvoni, and Celgene's Revlimid):
What's abundantly clear is that the marketing teams from some of the biggest biopharmaceutical companies in the world have their work cut out for them in the coming years as they set out to make new drugs the go-to options for doctors and patients throughout the U.S. and the world.