Roche’s future strategy against biosimilars, Focus Reports
Release Date: 2010-12-14
The biotech giant Roche has announced through its CEO Severin Schwan the development of a strategy to counterattack competition coming from biosimilars. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Schwan explains that the strategy is based on three main pillars.
The first pillar involves focusing on the improvement of current biotechnology products that Roche commercializes today. These are also known as “biobetters” and the idea is to have a product that brings something new and better to the market by tweaking the current formulations. "Eventually the patents will expire; biosimilars will come into the market. What really counts is to bring in a new product which has a meaningful clinical difference" explains Schwan.
The second pillar of the Swiss company’s strategy relies on developing innovative drugs to bring new solutions to diseases on a global scale. As a matter of fact, the trastuzumab-DM1 breast cancer drug that the company recently developed has failed to get an early approval. Nevertheless, Roche is betting that as soon as the product is approved (which can happen even before having the Phase III clinical data) is will be able to start marketing the product immediately.
The third and last pillar of the counterattack strategy is based on the cooperation with regulators and lawmakers in order to set a very high standard for biosimilar copies. This is translated into considerable studies required before getting approval for companies trying to copy a Roche product.
The above-mentioned strategy is a way to prevent and not to cure biomedical imitations, given that Roche nowadays does not face substantial competition in its biosimilar area. This market still contains very high entry barriers which give a competitive advantage to large global pharmaceutical companies versus small molecule producers. Schwan calls it “a different world” and he states that Roche does not expect a high level of competition in this market in the foreseeable future.
Nevertheless, two of Roche’s important products – Herceptin and Mabthera will lose their patents in 2014 and 2015 respectively, being followed by Avastin in 2018. Even though this fact could increase the concerns of the Swiss giant, Schwan is confident of the future and emphasises the fact that the company will continue to focus on their strengths and not diversify its business into biosimilars and generics, like other competitors did.
| Type: | NORMAL |
| Company: | Focus Reports |
| Country: | 瑞士 |