Thursday, February 22, 2007

A couple of extra thoughts from 2006

-Anybody else surprised that Iressa racked up nearly a quarter billion in revenue? I thought AZ was just maintaining Iressa in the hopes that biomarker/personalized medicine research would fully characterize responders with significant sales to come only after conclusive studies, but Iressa is still achieving good levels of revenue.

-it's early, but it doesn't look like Vectibix negatively affected Erbitux.

-For an eight year old drug, Herceptin's nearly half-billion dollar revenue gain is very impressive. (Uh, actually, a half-billion dollar revenue gain is great for anyone, anytime.)

-Earning honors as "First KD to drop off the list," Macugen probably will come very close to zeroing out in 2007, as OSI is exiting the business, as detailed today....

-.....because of Lucentis, which had an amazing introduction in 2006.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If you consider the initial sales projections for Glivec (?? ~250m USD pa??) and actual sales (?? >2bn USD pa) perhaps the success of Iressa isn't all that surprising.

Maybe oncologists out there are giving it a shot off-label in poor prognosis cases, in combination with other medications? I am not at all clued up on the side-effect profile, but if it's not too bad, the oncologists may be thinking, Can it do any harm to give it a shot?