Jeffrey Casberg Predicts Generic, Biosimilar Competition in the Pharmaceutical Market

Jeffrey Casberg, RPh, MS, senior vice president of pharmacy at IDP Analytics, LLC mentions several drugs due to lose patent exclusivity soon, which would allow generic versions to be produced. Casberg discusses biosimilar competition, a relatively new phenomenon in the pharmaceutical industry that could lead to significant price reductions.

He highlighted various types of medications, ranging from oncology treatments, to diabetes, inflammatory diseases, and age-related macular degeneration. Casberg suggests stakeholders remain vigilant of these patent expirations in the upcoming year or couple of years as he and other experts work to analyze and determine drug life cycle insights to predict future market shifts.

Transcript:

With brand patents expiring, which products about to face upcoming generic and biosimilar competition do you think stakeholders should be keeping their eye on?

Yeah, there are a couple products coming down the road that would be losing exclusivity. The first one I'll hit is Victoza [liraglutide], it's a GLP-1 [inhibitor]. You can't talk about pharmaceuticals today without talking about GLP-1 [inhibitors] and weight loss.

So, Victoza was kind of a big advance back in its day. It was the first once daily GLP-1 [inhibitor], once daily subcutaneous administered injectable product. It has less nausea associated with it than its previous predecessor, Byetta [exenatide]. It was also the first GLP-1 [inhibitor] that had cardiovascular positive studies for cardiovascular effect. Great drug but I don't see it really helping with this whole GLP-1 [inhibitor] shortage and weight loss issue.

If you look at Victoza and even Trulicity [dulaglutide], they both have about 50% the weight loss that Ozempic [semaglutide] and Mounjaro [tirzepatide] have so I don't see all of a sudden a big rush to go to Victoza generic because number 1: it's once a day, and number 2: it doesn't have the weight loss that some of the big products that you're hearing about every day have. So, that's Victoza, that'll be coming shortly here in June. I think there could be quite a few generics.

Two others, Tasigna [nilotinib] and Sprycel [dasatinib]. They're both tyrosine kinase inhibitors similar to Gleevec [imatinib mesylate], great drugs in oncology, pretty expensive therapies, and we should get quite a few generics and a good amount of price reduction there.

Then moving over to the biosimilars side, Stelara [ustekinumab] biosimilars are coming. Everybody's been talking about Humira [adalimumab] and 9 or 10 companies bringing those [biosimilars] to market but almost just as big, Stelara is a big drug—$15 to $20 billion product—and it also has 8 or 9 manufacturers lined up to bring products to market. We'll have to see if the adoption by payers is similar or quicker, we're just starting to have some success and conversion of Humira to biosimilars. We'll have to see how the payers adopts Stelara [biosimilars]. Maybe they've gained some more confidence and learned a little bit from the Humira introduction. We'll have to see and Stelara will be coming early in 2025. Amgen has the first product out but then pretty quickly thereafter, several other products will hit.

Stelara in early 2025, Eylea [aflibercept] biosimilars in the ophthalmology area, for age-related macular degeneration. We had Lucentis [ranibizumab] biosimilars come out with a couple of biosimilars recently and those biosimilars have done pretty well.

Eylea, we're watching, we don't know if it's going to come out this year, or in a year or 2. There's an opportunity this year, but IPD, the company I work for does a lot of predicting of this and we think it actually may not be in 2024, it might be 2025 or 2026 before we get Eylea, but watch for that. I had mentioned Victoza, Trulicity is a $16 billion GLP-1 [inhibitor], and it's biosimilar [could be] out in 2027. Something to plan for by the payers.