Promise That Didn't Pan Out

Luke Timmerman has a good piece on a drug (Bexxar) that looked useful, had a lot of time, effort, and money spent on it, but still never made any real headway. GSK has announced that they're ceasing production, and if there are headlines about that, I've missed them. Apparently there were only a few dozen people in the entire US who got the drug at all last year.

When you look at the whole story, there’s no single reason for failure. There were regulatory delays, manufacturing snafus, strong competition, reimbursement challenges, and issues around physician referral patterns.

If this story sounds familiar, it should—there are some striking similarities to what happened more recently with Dendreon’s sipuleucel-T (Provenge). If there’s a lesson here, it’s that cool science and hard medical evidence aren’t enough. When companies fail to understand the markets they are entering, the results can be quite ugly, especially as insurers tighten the screws on reimbursement. If more companies fail to pay proper attention to these issues, you can count on more promising drugs like Bexxar ending up on the industry scrap heap.

Source: In the Pipeline - August 27, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs