Pfizer's and Bristol-Myers Squibb's Eliquis will lead the market for stroke-preventing blood thinners after "best-in-class" clinical trial results that marry safety with effectiveness, analysts said.
The twice-daily pill had a 31 per cent lower risk of major bleeding, a feared side effect of blood thinners, than the current standard treatment, warfarin, researchers said at the European Society of Cardiology's conference in Paris. Patients on Eliquis had an 11 per cent reduced risk of dying, the first time a warfarin replacement has saved lives in a study.
Pfizer and Bristol-Myers may now take 60 per cent of the market for blood thinners to ward off strokes in people with an irregular heartbeat, according to analysts for ISI Group and Leerink Swann and Co. Leerink estimates sales of warfarin replacements will reach $7 billion to $9 billion a year.
"The bleeding profile is phenomenal and trumps everything else," Mark Schoenebaum, a New York-based analyst for ISI, said in a telephone interview. "Clearly, this drug will be the leader in the market."
Yesterday's results may mean an additional $1 billion in peak sales for Eliquis, also known as apixaban, Leerink's Seamus Fernandez said in a telephone interview. The Boston-based analyst now forecasts the drug will garner peak sales of $4.1 billion by 2017, writing in a note to investors that it's "best-in-class" for safety and reducing deaths.
Pfizer and Bristol-Myers trailed two competitors in the race to bring a warfarin replacement to market. Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH's Pradaxa was the first, approved last year in the US Bayer AG and Johnson and Johnson also have a candidate, Xarelto, due for regulatory review in the US next month.
Until the Paris conference, the two US drugmakers had only compared Eliquis with aspirin. Now cardiologists have results of two large trials showing the drug is safe, a potentially compelling argument, said Lars Wallentin, a cardiologist at Uppsala Clinical Research Centre in Sweden who worked on both Eliquis and Pradaxa.
Bloomberg
