Merck & Co and South Korea’s Samsung Bioepis have announced the launch of their biosimilar of Remicade® (infliximab), the blockbuster immune-mediated inflammatory disorders treatment it markets outside the U.S., including Europe, while partner Janssen Biotech is set to market the drug stateside.
The biosimilar is the first to reach the U.S. market through a global biosimilars development and commercialization agreement between Merck and Samsung Bioepis, a joint venture of Samsung and Biogen.
Renflexis is the second U.S. biosimilar version of Remicade to be sold with Pfizer Inc. Launching its biosimilar — a generic version of a drug made with living cells — of Johnson & Johnson’s blockbuster inflammation drug Remicade, all the way back in November; owing to which, the biosimilar market is expected to be hit badly with prices will rapidly drop, eating away at the profits of everybody involved.
Remicade had U.S. sales of $4.8 billion last year. They fell 8.2 percent for the first half of 2017 to $2.2 billion with the new competition.
Pfizer Inc launched its Inflectra late last year at a 15 percent discount to J&J’s list price, later dropped to a 19 percent discount.
Pfizer will likely be forced to match Merck and Samsung price cut. And
then J&J will have a harder time getting people to pick its more-expensive original, which is expected to be J&J’s largest medicine through 2019.Merck and Samsung are setting a scary precedent by more than doubling Pfizer’s discount in the lucrative U.S. market despite being only the second biosimilar to arrive there. That discount comes before large insurers and pharmacy benefit managers have started negotiating their own price breaks- the total cut may be even larger.
Eventually the short honeymoon period of modest discounts for new biosimilars will lead to cutthroat competition soon enough; which is likely not what firms anticipated when they committed years and big budgets to breaking into this market.
The big positive of all this, of course, is that lower prices mean many more patients will get access to these medicines. But the biosimilar pie may be smaller and split more ways than some drugmakers expected.
