Big money in biologics
Thursday, July 16 2009
If you take Humira, Remicade, or any similar biologic drug, or if you have any illness that might need to be treated with a biologic, you might be interested in this post from the Wall Street Journal. Look at these numbers:
J&J is already a big player in the market with Remicade, which brought in $1.1 billion in worldwide sales in the second quarter…
There are 61,000 total weekly prescriptions for drugs in this class, and Humira has 26,000 of them…
Abbott is “comfortable with the overall competitive profile” of Humira, whose $1.3 billion in sales for the quarter was a 20% increase compared to last year, said Abbott….
That’s around $5 billion per year for Abbot, just for Humira – with just over a million prescriptions a year. That works out to about $4,000 per prescription – and I’m not sure if some of those are for repeats for the same patients. Any way you look at it, this is big money.
